[Distutils] Idea: move accepted interoperability specifications to packaging.python.org

[holger krekel]

I'd appreciate a "current packaging specs" site which ideally also states
how pypa tools support it, since which version.

holger

On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 16:18 -0400, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Daniel's started work on a new revision of the wheel specification,
> and it's crystallised a concern for me that's been building for a
> while: the Python Enhancement Proposal process is fundamentally a
> *change management* process and fundamentally ill-suited to acting as
> a *hosting service* for the resulting reference documentation.
> 
> This is why we're seeing awkward splits like the one I have in PEP
> 440, where the specification itself is up top, with the rationale for
> changes below, and the large amounts of supporting material in PEP
> 426, where the specification is mixed in with a lot of background and
> rationale that isn't relevant if you just want the technical details
> of the latest version of the format.
> 
> It also creates a problem where links to PEP based reference documents
> are fundamentally unstable - when we define a new version of the wheel
> format in a new PEP then folks are going to have to follow the daisy
> chain from PEP 427 through to the new PEP, rather than having a stable
> link that automatically presents the latest version of the format,
> perhaps with archived copies of the old version readily available.
> 
> I think I see a way to resolve this, and I believe it should be fairly
> straightforward: we could create a "specifications" section on
> packaging.python.org, and as we next revise them, we start migrating
> the specs themselves out of the PEP system and into
> packaging.python.org. This would be akin to the change in the Python
> 3.3, where the specification of the way the import system worked
> finally moved from PEP 302 into the language reference.
> 
> Under that model, the wheel 2.0 would be specifically focused on
> describing and justifying the *changes* between 1.0 and 2.0, but the
> final spec itself would be a standalone document living on
> packaging.python.org, and prominently linked to from both PEP 427
> (which it would Supersede) and from the new PEP.
> 
> This approach also gives a much nicer model for fixing typos in the
> specifications - those would just be ordinary GitHub PR's on the
> packaging.python.org repo, rather than needing to update the PEPs
> repo.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Regards,
> Nick.
> 
> -- 
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
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> 

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