[Distutils] RFC: Updating PEP 345

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 5:47 PM, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:
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> Jim Fulton wrote:
>> On Apr 11, 2009, at 2:09 PM, Tres Seaver wrote:
>
>>> BBB concerns often trump TOOWTDI.
>>
>>
>> Sure, but there's no BBB concern here -- unless we create one.
>
> Your desire to preserve the 'install_requires' argument feels like a
> backward-compatibility requirement to me (and one which I'm fine with
> keeping indefinitely). You have a separate desire, which is to use the
> spelling 'Install-Requires' for the PKG-INFO field corresponding to
> 'install_requires'.  I would prefer to keep the names close to those
> already proposed in PEP 345 ('Requries-External', 'Requires-Python').
>
> My desire is to keep the PKG-INFO specification and field names clean
> and internally consistent:  there is no BBB concern here, because the
> existing 'Requires:' field won't be touched (although we will deprecate
> it).  Keeping the fieldnames consistent within that file seems more
> important to me than an (already violated) expectation that setup()
> argument names map mechanically onto PKG-INFO field names.

While there's no bijection between the arguments and  the PKG-INFO fields,
some arguments *are*  PKG-INFO fields;

If we would start a package from scratch today, what we would have for thos ?
probably the same name for the argument and the field.

What I hear here is that since we don't start from scratch we have to
compromise on consistency so we don't bather with BBB. But the goal
is also to make Distutils a better citizen in this area *and* to use
the best name.

And some people in the future might not understand why they can't use
"requires_dist" in the arguments, like they use "classifiers" and "author",

and they will find it rather strange if we tell them "This is for
historical reason !"

So, while I perfectly understand Jim and Tres points, I do think we
need to have an argument that matches the PKG-INFO field name, even
if it's doubled with another one.

Cheers
Tarek