[Python-Dev] Fwd: PEP 426 is now the draft spec for distribution metadata 2.0

[Daniel Holth]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 4:34 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

> On 19.02.2013 14:40, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 11:23 PM, M.-A. Lemburg <mal at egenix.com> wrote:
> >> * PEP 426 doesn't include any mention of the egg distribution format,
> >>   even though it's the most popular distribution format at the moment.
> >>   It should at least include the location of the metadata file
> >>   in eggs (EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO) and egg installations
> >>   (<eggdir>/EGG-INFO/PKG-INFO).
> >
> > "Other tools involved in Python distribution may also use this format."
> >
> > The egg format has never been, and never will be, officially endorsed
> > by python-dev. The wheel format is the standard format for binary
> > distribution, and PEP 376 defines the standard location for metadata
> > on installed distributions.
>
> Oh, come on, Nick, that's just silly. setuptools was included in stdlib
> for a short while, so the above is simply wrong. Eggs are the most
> widely used binary distribution format for Python package on PyPI:
>
> # wc *files.csv
>   25585   25598 1431013 2013-02-19-egg-files.csv
>    4619    4640  236694 2013-02-19-exe-files.csv
>     254     255   13402 2013-02-19-msi-files.csv
>  104691  104853 5251962 2013-02-19-tar-gz-files.csv
>      24      24    1221 2013-02-19-whl-files.csv
>   17937   18022  905913 2013-02-19-zip-files.csv
>  153110  153392 7840205 total
>
> (based on todays PyPI stats)
>
> It doesn't really help ignoring realities... and I'm saying
> that as one of the core devs who got setuptools kicked out of
> the stdlib again.
>
> --
> Marc-Andre Lemburg
> eGenix.com
>

The wheel philosophy is that it should be supported by both python-dev and
setuptools and that you should feel happy about using setuptools if you
like it whether or not python-dev (currently) endorses that. If you are
using setuptools (distribute's pkg_resources) then you can use both at the
same time.

Distribute, distutils and setuptools' problems have not been well
understood which I think is why there has been a need to discredit
setuptools by calling it non-standard. It is the defacto standard. If your
packages have dependencies there is no other choice. Wheel tries to solve
the real problem by allowing you to build a package with setuptools while
giving the end-user the choice of installing setuptools or not.

Of course eggs are the most popular right now. The wheel format is very
egg-like while avoiding some of egg's problems. See the comparison in the
PEP or read the story on wheel's rtfd. The wheel project includes tools to
losslessly convert eggs or bdist_wininst to wheel.

I am confident distlib can thrive outside of the standard library! Why the
rush to kill it before its prime?
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