[Distutils] distribution name capitalisation considered important ; -)

[Sridhar Ratnakumar]

  On 9/15/2010 8:59 AM, Chris Withers wrote:
> On 15/09/2010 16:57, Sridhar Ratnakumar wrote:
>> On 9/15/2010 6:53 AM, Chris Withers wrote:
>>> Looks like we have quite a consistent set of rules with regard to
>>> captilisation of package names on file systems where case isn't
>>> important, shame the same can't be said for distribution names.
>>> [...]These differences cause subtle problems in tools which attempt to
>>> pin versions of particular distributions.
>> Going by what you wrote about pinning versions, are you talking about
>> Buildout?
> Yes, but I expect the subtleties apply to otehr tools too...
Hmm. I wonder if distutils2' metadata parser and distribution classes 
(will) handle names case-insensitively.
>>> lowercased by all tools all of the time. How do others feel about this?
>> pip, easy_install and pypm already ignore case.
> The only "sane" option now would be for all distribution names to be
>
> ...sometimes ;-)
pypm always ignores case, I am not sure about pip, easy_install. 
"pip|easy_install install pastescript" worked for me though.
>> But not buildout? I
>> suggest that we a) make pypi disallow registering package names with a
>> differing case
> That won't help, and it's not feasible. PyPI is far from the only 
> index people use.
Are there package indexes, apart from PyPI, that allows registering 
packages?
> b) make buildout case-insensitive.
> Indeed. 
Doing so is a good idea. It didn't lead to any conflicts at least in my 
experience. Maybe make this part of the metadata parser in distutils2, 
Tarek?

-srid