Mention dist-info files in the packaging policy?

[Nick Coghlan]

On 23 September 2015 at 02:54, Jason L Tibbitts III <tibbs at math.uh.edu> wrote:
>>>>>> "NC" == Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> writes:
>
> NC> I just noticed that the packaging policy doesn't currently mention
> NC> dist-info directories, only the older egg-info:
> NC> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Python#Files_to_include
>
> dist-info is completely new to me.  I never particularly understood eggs
> so I'm sure I'll understand "dists" or whatever it's called now.

It's a metadata directory installed alongside Python packages to let
Python tools know which packages are installed:
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0376/#one-dist-info-directory-per-installed-distribution

At various times over the last couple of years we'd discussed the
notion of using pip rather than direct setup.py invocation in the
Python install macros, which would generate that more complete
metadata rather than the partial metadata generated in .egg-info by
setuptools, or the complete lack of installation metadata generated by
plain distutils. (The main discussion I remember is one with Toshio
Kuratomi at Flock 2013, but I think it also came up in a discussion
with Slavek Kabrda last year).

However, it looks like I'd misrembered the situation, and changing the
RPM install macros to generate modern metadata is still in the "this
might be desirable" stage. That's a much bigger change than just
tweaking the docs to mention the updated metadata location.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia