[Distutils] Alternate static metadata PEP submission...

[David Lyon]

On Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:59:48 +0900, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> Saying that a packaging tool is about copying files is not very useful -
> you could say that programming is just moving bytes around and you would
> be right as well :)

Well it is about moving bytes around..

That *is* just how I see it..

> I am quite agnostic on the syntax as well - as PJE mentioned a couple of
> months ago when talking about a new distutils from scratch, even using
> XML for a first prototype would be acceptable. The .cabal file has a
> nice syntax, though, and quite pythonic in some ways (indentation
> instead of brace for example).

It's just too hard to do and adds another layer of complexity to
deal with. I'm on limited time like everybody else.

ConfigParser for all it's annoying faults is still quire powerful.

I don't like nesting in configuration files. I tend to side with
the configparser approach of not allowing nesting. More importantly
than that, I don't believe that this particular use case gets
complicated enough to require nesting.

You can achieve a type nesting with configparser by just making 
the section names ever long. It achieves the same thing imho.

Some people disapproved strongly of xml. Most were lukewarm about
configparser - and we can't find an implementation of haskel.

So for me, I'll go with the lukewarmers..

Primary concern is using something that exists or will work
on 'most' python versions. I'm not sure how many python 1.5
thrillseekers still use 1.5 solely anymore. But if there are
some, configparser shouldn't offend them.

David