This page discuss the way to separate the metadata in a static PKG-INFO like file.

• use the distutils.dist.DistutilsMetadata as a basis to think about a read/write API an example

  • - implemented in distutils2.metadata.DistributionMetadata

• think about the dynamic metadata issue (can we provide something for that ?)
• write a best practice guide for people to separate their metadata in a separate file, and use it in their setup.py

  • - progress about that tracked in http://bugs.python.org/issue8252

TresSeaver's notes

Matthias Klose and I worked on this a bit. We settled on the idea of reusing the 'setup.cfg' file, by relaxing the "one section per command" rule to allow spelling more arbitrary metadata.

I commented to reflect work happening in distutils2 –ÉA (Éric Araujo)

In particular, we proposed the following changes:

• Document use of extra sections, not directly connected to a command.
  • - work in progress (ÉA)
• Allow expansion of values using '${key:value}' semantics from other sections.
  • Alternative: When passing arguments to commands, pass the whole

    'ConfigParser' (to allow pulling in config from other commands / sections. This is more general, so maybe a "better" choice, but might break backward-compatibility with out-of-core commands.

• Add new distutils commands, each with their own sections in 'setup.cfg' (these sections would break out files currently labeled only as 'data' into categories more useful to downstream packageers).
  • 'install_docs'
  • 'install_i18n' / 'install_locales'. See the Ubuntu extension which alread does this stuff: 'python-distutils-extra', maintained by Sebastian Heinlein.
  • 'install_tests'?
  • Alternative: add one or more new sections, not based on a command, which captures the extra stuff.

    See http://hg.python.org/distutils2/file/tip/docs/design/wiki.rst —ÉA

• Add a distutils command which generates ConfigParser section text (on 'sys.stdout') based on values passed to 'setup()'. This command would provide a migration path for existing distributions, who would capture the output to a file, review it, and then concatenate it onto their 'setup.cfg'.

• Eventually, the only thing in 'setup.py' for the majority of packages would be:
  • try:
    • from setuptools import setup

    except ImportError:

    • from distutils import setup
    setup() # use the data in setup.cfg
• The only reason to include 'setup.py' at all would be for compatibility with existing docs, etc. The "normal" installation dance might be something like:
  • $ python -m distutils.commands.install
  or a generated script which did the same thing.