I have some confusion over the name .egg-info. From what I understand,
Eggs are a packaging format that contain metadata. But if you take a
Distutils installed package and put a .egg-info file or directory
beside it, that doesn't make the package an Egg, does it?
To add to this confusion, I always associate the Egg format with the
additional metadata fields provided by setuptools. So when I see .egg-
info I always expect that the PKG-INFO will contain an
'install_requires' field, etc. It would be more understandable (to me)
if this directory was named .pkg-info, .metadata, .install or
something. But then I guess that's a somewhat disruptive change for
small gains.
An alternative to bridging the disconnect between the setuptools
metadata fields and the distutils metadata fields would be to add the
setuptools fields to distutils as standard package metadata. Adding
those metadata fields hasn't been propsed yet as it's own PEP, has it?
I guess that PEP would entail a little more work than just managing a
set of fields since PyPI would also need to be updated to display
those fields. But it would be really lovely to be able to see the
'install_requires' field when browsing PyPI - and click on links in
that field to take you to those pakcages PyPI pages. And as an added
bonus if the 'namespace_packages' field was clickable such that the
link took you to a list of all packages which participated in that
namespace, that'd be pretty sweet!
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