[Distutils] Last PEP 426 update for a while

[Vinay Sajip]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:

> 6. Qualified names are currently restricted to Python 2 compatible
> identifiers.

This constraint causes some problems in practice, some of which might be
more problematic than others:

1. Some existing distributions have group names which violate the constraint.
   For example, nose uses group names such as "nose.plugins.0.10". Around a
   hundred other distributions advertise plugins under group names like this.

2. Some distributions have package names which aren't actual packages but
   which nevertheless contain source files. For example, Django lists
   "django.utils.2to3_fixers" in its list of packages, though this is just
   a directory containing fixers and not an actual package. This, of course,
   also violates the constraint.

It seems like it might be worth relaxing the restriction so that a qualified
name starts with a Python 2 compatible segment, but can have subsequent
components matching the [A-Za-z0-9]+ pattern.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip