[Zope3-dev] Re: More thoughts on packaging

[Martijn Faassen]

Jeremy Hylton wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>
Okay, if setup.py is introspectible that's fine with me too. That would 
introduce some backwards compatibility issues, perhaps, though.

>>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.
>
>  
>
I'm talking declarative, I deliberately didn't say XML as that yanks 
people's chains. A Python program is not declarative and in case of 
setup.py clearly encourages ad-hoc hackery. If we're going to require 
some completely fixed declarative Python structure, or ZConfig, or 
whatever else, that's fine too. If someone then needs XML they can 
always translate it. The point is that currently this not possible.

>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.
>  
>
I'm not saying we should use an oddball little configuration language. 
We should use something that is not oddball and familiar to people and 
declarative.

Regards,

Martijn