[Distutils] Changing the separator from - to ~ and allow all Unicode alphanumerics in package names...

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

On 11/10/2012 03:38 AM, Daniel Holth wrote:
> Although I think the ~ is a very ugly -, it could be useful to change
> the separator to something less commonly used than the -.
>
> It would be useful to be able to use the hyphen - in the version of a
> package (for semver) and elsewhere. Using it as the separator could make
> parsing the file name a bit trickier than is healthy.
>
> This change would affect PEP 376 which reads:
>
> This distinct directory is named as follows::
>
>      name + '-' + version + '.dist-info'
>
> python_package-1.0.0_four+seven.dist-info
>
> with today's hyphen/underscore folding: re.sub('[^A-Za-z0-9.]+', '-',
> version), could become
>
> python-package~1.0.0-four+seven.dist-info
>
>
> It would also affect pip, setuptools, and the wheel peps. If we do this,
> I would like to allow Unicode package names at the same time.
> safe_name(), the pkg_resources function that escapes package names for
> file names, would become
>
> re.sub(u"[^\w.]+", "_", u"package-name", flags=re.U)
>
>
> In other words, the rule for package names would be that they can
> contain any Unicode alphanumeric or _ or dot. Right now package names
> cannot practically contain non-ASCII because the setuptools installation
> will fold it all to _ and installation metadata will collide on the disk.
>
> safe_version(), presently the same as safe_name() would also need to
> allow + for semver.

How about, rather than trying to create a complicated 1:1 mapping 
between metadata and filename, just use a hash of the metadata?

There should still be a "user-readable" part of the filename, but it now 
only has to be a one-way function that is allowed to collide.
So if you do for some reason have a collision in the user-friendly part 
the hash still saves you,

python-package-1.0.0-fa43534fbab3434534aba
python-package-1.0.0-3423432534abbcaba3423

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