[Catalog-sig] metadata

[Guido van Rossum]

I read lots of good things in Kapil's message.  He doesn't seem to be
the kind of guy who needs a PEP before he starts coding.  That's fine.
Sometimes you need to build a few prototypes before you can agree on a
standard; actually the most successful standards are usually obtained
that way.  His alternative implementation can provide input for a
revision of the PEP.  I would hope that (a) the PEP is written in such
a way to allow an implementation to collect more metadata than is
standardized by the PEP; (b) Kapil makes his implementation conformant
to the PEP by making his extensions optional (at least in some kind of
compatibility mode); (c) the PEP authors and Kapil can keep talking so
that Kapil won't have to learn on his own the wisdom collected in the
PEP, and the PEP can benefit from Kapil's experience.  (Actually,
that's two PEPs: 241 and 243.)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)