[Distutils] Tasks arising from IPC9

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Andrew Kuchling wrote:
> 
> 1) For 2.1final, change the Distutils sdist command to construct a
>    text file containing the metadata for a package.  Exactly *what*
>    metadata to collect was left open for subsequent discussion on the
>    Catalog-SIG.  (Amos has a patch to implement this that I'll look at
>    when I can.)
> 
>    This is the only thing to be done in time for 2.1, so it's the only
>    really pressing task.
> 
> 2) Once that metadata support is there, someone can start running an
>    experimental swalow server and begin adding to its database.
>    If Python 2.2 comes along in 6-12 months, that should be enough
>    time to have an idea of what should go into 2.2 to support it.
> 
> 3) Other Distutils changes would be to design and create a package
>    database, and implement an uninstall command.  The 'sdist' command
>    would also grow an --upload or --register option that would
>    automatically submit the package to the catalog (but first we'd need
>    to finalize how that should be done).

Note that we already decided on the name of the uninstall command
at the conference: "uninstall". Package developers can use this
command name to implement this feature in a forward compatible
way.

Another point I'd like to raise is that of providing a generic
"test" command. Most packages provide regression tests which allow
to quickly find out where problems might be hiding. There is currently
no support in distutils to run these tests.

Could we make a similar decision on the name of the command (before
actually adding support for it to distutils), so that package
authors can start coding their own implementation now ?!

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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