New submission from Zooko O'Whielacronx <zo...@zooko.com>: The .egg-info files which are produced by distutils in Python >= 2.5 are the only standard, cross-platform way for a Python package ("distribution") to declare its name and version number in a machine-parseable way. Unfortunately, these files are named ".egg-info" even when the Python package in question was produced by distutils without setuptools, was never packaged as an egg, and is not installed as an egg. It has nothing to do with "egg". The fact that the file has "egg" in its name causes most people to think that it has something to do with eggs, which leads to all sorts of problems including people removing the file and thus deleting the machine-parseable metadata about the Python package's name and version number.
This ticket is a request that distutils start calling this file ".pkg-info" instead. Obviously we can't just stop including them under the name ".egg-info" since that would break existing usage, but we could start producing files under the name ".pkg-info", and make ".egg-info" be a symlink or a copy of ".pkg-info" for backwards compatibility. Also of course we can update the documentation (if there is any) of what the .pkg-info file is. Since the current problems are mostly problems of communication and documentation, this simple change to the name of the file might go a long way to improving things. ---------- assignee: tarek components: Distutils messages: 83492 nosy: tarek, zooko severity: normal status: open title: ".egg-info" => ".pkg-info" type: feature request versions: Python 2.7 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue5480> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com