Folks: (By the way, it was a pleasure to meet many of you in Real Life for the first time at Pycon.)
Here is what I want: 1. The standard Python build tools by default produce machine- parseable package metadata, which can include package dependency information with reasonably well-defined semantics. Oh good! I already have this, since distutils in Python >= 2.5 produces .egg-info metadata in an easy-to-parse format. 2. This machine-parseable metadata is widely supported and understood by the Python community. In retrospect, it's too bad that it isn't named ".pkg-info" instead of ".egg-info", in order to avoid the fraught politics around the concept of "eggs". A concrete example of such a misunderstanding is the sad fact that many Linux distributions were in the habit of deleting this information from their Python packages, perhaps because they were under the impression that it was obviated by their packaging tools. The major distributions have all stopped doing this now. Unifying the created-by-default PKG-INFO files and the created-by- default .egg-info directories would be nice, too. 3. The standard Python library includes a tool to find and parse this metadata, so that I can write programmatic tests of my dependencies, like this: http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/_auto_deps.py?rev=2062 This is one of the improvements that I was anticipating from pkg_resources going into the standard library. 4. The standard Python library includes a tool to find and read resources (other than Python modules) that came bundled in a Python package. Consider, for example, this snippets of code in Nevow: http://divmod.org/trac/browser/trunk/Nevow/setup.py?rev=13786#L10 http://divmod.org/trac/browser/trunk/Nevow/setup.py?rev=13786 http://divmod.org/trac/browser/trunk/Nevow/setup_egg.py?rev=2406 When Nevow uses pkg_resources to import its files such as "default.css", then it is able to find at runtime, even if is being imported from a py2exe or py2app zip, or on other platforms where its homegrown setup script and homegrown "find my file" function fail. So using pkg_resources (and setuptools to install it) makes "test_nevow" pass on all of the allmydata.org buildslaves: http://allmydata.org/buildbot/waterfall?show_events=false Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
