[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 2:52 PM, R. David Murray<rdmurray at bitdance.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jul 2009 at 13:05, Paul Moore wrote:
>>
>> 2009/7/7 Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au>:
>> [... lots of interesting stuff deleted ...]
>>>
>>> I think it's not the developer's burden to decide *where* such files go;
>>> rather, they should be declaring only the *purpose* of these files in
>>> the distribution metadata, and it's up to the site-specific installer
>>> (possibly as configured by the installing user) to decide the location
>>> of each file by its declared purpose.
>>
>> That's a whole different PEP, though.
>
> Which one?  It seems to me that supporting this is implicit in
> the language summit goals of (1) having distutils be better support
> infrastructure for system packaging utilities and (2) needing a way to
> deal with resource files "that might be installed in a specific place on
> the target system by the system packager".  I'll grant that I'm reading
> between the lines, it isn't an explicitly stated goal.  But it was the
> direction my mind went when I read Tarek's notes, given that the first
> stated goal is "standardize more metadata".

Yes but the topic is so wide that it has to be cut in several PEP, and
things have to be done gradually

So far:

- PEP 376 : standard for the metadata format and location + query APIs
- PEP 345 : standard for the metadata *content* - work in progress too
(there's a branch with new fields waiting)
- PEP 386 : standard for version comparisons

topics that are not yet in PEP are grouped on the wiki page (under
"current work") with notes :

http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils

When I started to work on this I didn't realize the gigantic amount of
work and coordination
it requires, and I do understand now the current state. At first I was
trying to coordinate interested
people to work on each topic mentioned there in parallel. (like we did
a bit after the summit)
But at the end, it seems that having everyone interested in packaging
matters focusing on the
less number of possible topics pays more.

PEP 376 is just a piece of  the puzzle but I am confident it will
speed up other tasks since
it raises our common ground knowledge.