[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Vinay Sajip]

Daniel Holth <dholth <at> gmail.com> writes:

> We need approximately five fields:
> 
> Name
> Version
> Provides-Extra
> Requires-Dist
> Setup-Requires-Dist
> 
> the rest are useless, never need to be parsed by anyone, or are
> already sent to pypi as a dict.
> 
> We need the environment markers language.
> 
> We need the requirements specifiers >= 4.0.0, < 9.
> 

You're taking a disappointingly narrow view of the metadata, it seems to me. If
you look at the totality of metadata which describes distributions in the here-
and-now world of setuptools, it's a lot more than that - just look at any of
my metadata files which I've pointed to in the "distil" documentation.

You're only talking about *installation* metadata, but even there your coverage
is incomplete. I won't go into any more details now, but suffice to say that as
I am working on "distil", I am coming across decisions about installation which
either I hard-code into distil (thus making it quite likely that another tool
will give different results), or enshrine in installation metadata (constraining
all compliant tools to adhere to the developer's and/or user's wishes in that
area).

Regards,

Vinay Sajip