[Distutils] State of the wheel spec (Was: How to handle launcher script importability?)

[Nick Coghlan]

On 22 August 2013 08:20, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Um, the current wheel spec uses PEP 345 + setuptools metadata only. If
> distlib is expecting PEP 426 metadata in wheel files, it is not compliant with
> the spec.
>
> I can certainly rectify that - I was possibly confused by the fact that the
> latest wheel implementation writes pydist.json to the wheel (though the Wheel-
> Version in WHEEL is still 1.0).

Yeah, they were certainly coupled together originally - that's why
PEPs 425, 426 and 427 all happened around the same time. However,
Daniel tweaked the wheel format spec in PEP 427 to remove the
dependency on the new metadata spec once he realised that most of the
features that wheels really needed already existed in the setuptools
metadata, and the metadata spec was going to take a *lot* longer to
stabilise than he originally thought.

However, the pydist.json that wheel currently writes is in the
category of "arbitrary additional metadata in the dist-info
directory", since the metadata 2.0 spec is still far from stable.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia