[Distutils] Metadata fields

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Wed, Mar 14, 2001 at 10:19:03PM -0700, Sean Reifschneider wrote:
>I'd recommend either using "Summary" and "Description", or
>"Short-Description" and "Description".  To me, the word "description"
>does not imply an 80-character limitation...

Good point; I'll make that change.

>I wrote some code for directly extracting the meta-data out of a .tar.*
>file, but it's easy enough to deal with getting the meta-data submitted
>seperately.

But then the meta-data file can get lost; I like having it in the
tarball so if you have the source, you automatically have the
metadata.

>I don't see any way of not providing the meta-data for binary packages
>(like trying to use the source meta-data instead), because we'll have
>to know things like:
>
>	Architecture
>	Platform-Name
>	Platform-Version

The problem is, "where do we put it?"  If I generate an RPM, where
does PKG-INFO go?  How do you find it again?  Where does it go in a
Windows .exe installer so that a catalog can read it out?  This is a
case where separate metadata would really make sense, but I think it
can't be resolved for 2.1.

>It'd be nice to have some way that users could override that if, for
>example, they use different e-mail addresses for each package (as I often
>do), or there is a collision for some other reason...  I don't think that
>using the e-mail address is unreasonable though...

That's up to the cataloguer, not the Distutils.  I'll reword that in
the PEP.

--amk