At 02:33 PM 4/8/2009 +0200, Lennart Regebro wrote:
On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 14:23, Tres Seaver <tsea...@palladion.com> wrote:
> I want *less* stuff (ideally nothing) spelled in imperative Python, with
> some common declarative file replacing both the information currently in
> setup.py and MANIFEST.in. I thought we were in agreement that
> non-introspectable metadata was a Bad Thing(TM)?
>
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/StaticMetadata
For me, the important part is that it's not spread around many files.
I would also tend to prefer some INI-type file format than python
code. On the other hand, python code offers benefits such as being
able to dynamically change the data depending on things like module
availability and python version, etc.
That's why my preference is to make the static format oriented for
machine-readability rather than human read/write ability. It should
then also be possible to generate the static format from Python or
from other formats, and to define a standard around either setup.py
commands or something else to let an installer tool request
generation of the static data.
Like WSGI, the lingua franca needn't be pretty, just
well-defined. Heck, I'd almost be willing to use XML for the file
format, since XML would make it easy to tag files with multiple
pieces of information, such as "this is generated documentation that
should be installed" vs. "this is documentation source *and* should
also be installed" (e.g. a README.txt that's also reSTified to
HTML). XML also allows the markup vocabulary to be extended, and
unrecognized markup to be ignored, so that tagging files as
"installable" in the general case could allow a dumber installer to
just install them without needing to know if they're docs or data or
message catalogs or what.
That being said, if there was a better format than XML (for
appropriate values of "better"; i.e. YAML and JSON don't count), I'd
be happy with that too.
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