[Zope3-dev] Re: More thoughts on packaging

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 12:15, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Tres Seaver wrote:
> 
> >> Speaking as another large package maintainer, I'd like setup.py to be 
> >> either nonexistent, or automatically generated from something else 
> >> that's modular.
> >
> >
> > +1.  The configuration metadata in a typical setup.py can *never* be 
> > introspected, for intsance, short of writing bytecode hacks to pick 
> > apart the arguments passed to setup().
> 
> +1 too.

Again, this depends on convention.  If people created introspectable
objects in setup.py, it would be easy.

> As long as it's declarative and doesn't look like Procmail or M4 macros 
> or whatever, I'm fine too. :)

I would like to have a format that is designed for humans to read and
write first and for programs to process second.  Python meets this
requirement, but XML does not.  I don't care too much about the details,
though.

Note that distutils already has one configuration file -- MANIFEST.in --
and there was some discussion on the distutils list about replacing that
with some Python code in setup.py.  The MANIFEST.in is this oddball
little configuration language that seems wordier than the equivalent
Python code.

Jeremy