Richard Jones' Log: Distutils sprinting at PyCon
Sat, 29 Jan 2005
I've signed up for the distutils sprint at (before) PyCon - Fred has offered support for PEP 314, and I've stated that I'll sit in a corner and implement PEP 243 by myself if need be, but I want to get it done in those four days. Having someone with root access to python.org handy would make it possible to finish the project in the four days, rather than leave it dangling as happens all too often (not a dig at the python.org roto-rooters, just a recognition that they're busy people).
Neat. I have replied cc'ing to catalog-sig for further discussion.
Just FYI, Bob Ippolito and I are working on a new distutils-related project that may have ramifications for the PEPs you mention as well as PEP 262.
Specifically we're working on a .zip-based ".egg" format for distributing Python packages and accompanying resource files. It supports all of the hard problems in running packages from inside a .zip file, such as access to "real" resource files for C code, and autoextract of C extensions. Bob already has a proof-of-concept implementation of the runtime, and I hope to start work on the bdist command for it shortly. This format would obsolete PEP 262, since removing a package will be a matter of just deleting its .egg file. It affects PEP 314 too, because "download URL" doesn't allow for platform-specific binary distribution like .egg files, and because better platform information is needed.
There are a lot of things that need to be done to finalize the .egg build-time and run-time support, but once those things are done, we believe that many cataloging facilities will have much clearer requirements than they have previously, which should make it easier to actually specify the semantics of lots of things that right now are "this field has undefined semantics".