[Zope3-dev] More thoughts on packaging

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Fri, 2004-02-13 at 18:16, Fred Drake wrote:
> Dependency information is just one portion of a package's metadata.  It 
> should be included along with the other metadata related to the package 
> itself.  I'd be happy for it to live in the same place as the other package 
> metadata if we can get that to be in the right place: the package itself.
> 
> Using setup.py as a container for the package metadata has not worked well 
> as all, given how many setup.py scripts we maintain.

I haven't noticed any problems using ZODB3's setup.py to hold metadata. 
Did you have specific issues in mind?  Perhaps the metadata that is
currently in setup.py isn't that interesting -- a URL, email address,
description, and version number.

Several people have griped about having to put metadata in a Python
script.  I think they confusing policy and mechanism.  If a distutils
command needs metadata to operate, it must be passed to the setup()
call.  There's no requirement that the data passed to it be stored in a
script called setup.py or in any Python script.  You could put the
metadata in a file and write a helper routine that loads metadata to be
passed to setup.  (I'm not sure what the file format would be.  If I
have to write it by hand and my choices are Python and XML, I'll stick
with Python.)

Jeremy