[Python-Dev] Fwd: PEP 426 is now the draft spec for distribution metadata 2.0

[Daniel Holth]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 3:25 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 19 February 2013 13:40, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> If a tools wants to support metadata 2.0, it has to support all
> >> the complicated stuff as well, i.e. handle the requires fields,
> >> the environment markers and version comparisons/sorting.
> >
> > Which is what distutils2 can be used for now, and what distlib will
> > provide without the unwanted build system infrastructure in
> > distutils2.
>
> One particular item in Metadata 2.0 which needs to be addressed is
> requirements specifiers, as used in (for example) Requires-Dist. These
> take forms like "DistName (>= ver)". There are a number of potential
> issues here:
>
> 1. This differs from the pkg_resources format (which omits the
> parentheses). Having 2 subtly different formats is not a good idea in
> the long term. At the moment, pkg_resources format is used in pip
> requirements (on the command line and in requirement files) as well as
> in setuptools/distribute and possibly elsewhere.
> 2. There is currently no code that I am aware of that implements this
> spec. I don't believe distlib does (yet - give Vinay 5 minutes and who
> knows? :-)), pkg_resources as I said implements a different format,
> and distutils2, apart from being a big dependency to cover just this
> point, only matches the version (not the project name) and presumably
> does so using the distutils2 version ordering (which is incompatible
> with Metadata 2.0).
> 3. The format is fiddly to parse and process - nobody is likely to
> implement it for themselves without a library that does it (especially
> not when using pkg_resources is so easy).
>
> The PEP needs a rationale as to why the pkg_resources format wasn't
> used, and should suggest a migration path for projects which currently
> use the pkg_resources style (such as pip's requirements files).
>
> Paul


We did add full support for Metadata 2.0 Requires-Dist in pkg_resources.
The fiddling happens here:
https://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/src/tip/pkg_resources.py?at=default#cl-2469

The code removes the parenthesis and adds == when no operator was specified
to convert us back to the pkg_resources format. The rest of pkg_resources
carries on as before. Wheel installs would not pull in dependencies
otherwise.
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