[Distutils] The PEP 426 defined metadata version will be metadata 3.0

Vinay Sajip vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk
Thu Feb 27 09:30:17 CET 2014


> There is always going to be multiple files, it’s kind of silly to tie the definition of
> the dist-info directory to the pydist.json when that’s perhaps not the file you
> care about how to interpret. How do you interpret the RECORD file?
> The INSTALLER file? 



> The versioned definition of the dist-info directory would say, “RECORD file is an
> XYZ file” “pydist.json is an ABC file”. It’s the only sane way to handle the case
> where you can have an unbounded number of unknown files in the directory.

Those files are either implementation specific (in which case, not our responsibility)
or they are standardised, in which case there will be a PEP (376 for the files apart
from pydist.json). If it is felt that the formats in PEP 376 should be future-proofed,
then perhaps they should be coalesced into a single JSON file with its own
metadata version and schema definition (/ducks ;-)

The PEP 376 files are INSTALLER, RECORD, REQUESTED and RESOURCES
(which AFAIK isn't used). I don't know of any reason why they couldn't be merged
into a single file.

Any implementation specific caches of parts of those files (e.g. exports, for speed
of scanning) would be up to individual implementations to maintain (and perhaps belong
in implementation-named subdirectories of dist-info, to avoid conflicts with other
implementations).

Regards,

Vinay Sajip
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20140227/f010491f/attachment.html>


More information about the Distutils-SIG mailing list