[Distutils] [Python-Dev] distlib updated with resources API

[Donald Stufft]

On Sunday, September 30, 2012 at 1:33 AM, Daniel Holth wrote:
> Why not just let any line in pkg-info that starts with json/tag name: decode as json.

Why use a format that requires custom parsing knowledge to create an internal Python representation. It cannot even accurately represent all of the Metadata 1.2 data. The Project Url feature is a good example. The parser has to know that in order to take "Docs, http://docs.com/" and turn it into {"Docs": "https://docs.com/"} that it has to split on the , and strip the whitespace. Now in the future we add another item that needs a namespace, but this one needs to have "," in it's value, so now for this tag we decide to use : instead of ,. Leads to inconsistent syntax that needs to be reimplemented by anyone who wants to parse the file.

The lack of power of the current encoding already causes issue needing to layer on custom bits, why not just use a standard serialization format that can properly serialize all of the values. 
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