[Distutils] Draft PEP for JSON based metadata published

[holger krekel]

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 15:15 -0400, Daniel Holth wrote:
> On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 2:36 PM, holger krekel <holger at merlinux.eu> wrote:
> > Hi Nick,
> >
> > On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 21:36 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> >> After preliminary reviews by Donald and Daniel, I have now pushed the
> >> first complete draft of the JSON-based metadata 2.0 proposal to
> >> python.org
> >>
> >> PEP 426 (metadata 2.0): http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0426/
> >
> > After a first quick read i am wondering if i missed something
> > with respect to test tools.  There are some fields which specify
> > dependencies required for running tests, but there is nothing that
> > would tell which test runner to use, which test command to invoke,
> > or am i missing something?
> >
> > Basically i am wondering how PEP426 could be useful/used by tox.
> > best,
> 
> The first thing we might do is to have setuptools expose its
> test_suite argument as "extensions" : { "setuptools": { "test_suite":
> "callable.name" } }.

The way tox specifies testing is to allow arbitrary test commands not
just unittest test suites.  People use py.test, make and whatnot
to run tests.

> I think we need the next version of the metadata or sdist 2.0 to
> really do a better job than just running "setup.py test"; right now
> the tests usually only make sense in the context of an unpacked sdist.
> Input appreciated.

We certainly don't want to advocate using "setup.py" for running tests as
we want to get way from the neccessity for this file to exist (correct me
if i am wrong with this presumption).  The metadata should be rich 
enough to support tools like tox to perform the testing, much 
like pip for installations.

holger