David Lyon wrote:
That's why we need to keep it simple. Handle 85% of use cases with config and the other 15% with the ability to use (python) code.
The part that needs to by "code-like" is only the stuff that's needed when the config file is used by an installer, and is known only to the target system. Remember one of the points of having a static file (as we discussed at the language summit) is so that installers can install a "module distribution" (distutils term) without executing any python code.
So version dependencies might need to be code-like, per-python-version dependencies might also need to be. But the long description doesn't. If you want it to be read from some other file, use a script (possibly in a makefile) that generates the config file from various pieces.
I think these things that need to be code-like are things that depend on the target system and can't be known until an actual installation takes place. The rest of it can be truly static. I think this list of code-like things can and should be enumerated, and should be very small.
Ideally, they'd be translatable into the same sorts of expressions that are understood by rpm and deb (and other) installers, but that's a tall order.
Eric. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
