Re: Python EGG guidelines need updating

On 9 December 2016 at 04:35, Orion Poplawski <orion(a)cora.nwra.com&gt; wrote: The main Python guidelines link out to the Python Eggs page for more detail, so we probably don't want to just delete these sections without replacing them something. Perhaps replaces these first four entries with a single section like: ================ # Python level metadata for installed components To provide machine readable metadata regarding the Python components that are installed, Python projects may generate: * .egg-info files containing basic metadata regarding the package (e.g. plain distutils) * .egg-info directories containing a PKG-INFO file and other metadata files related to the component (e.g. setuptools, pip) * .dist-info directories containing a METADATA file and other metadata files related to the component (e.g. setuptools, pip) These files are read at runtime by various Python libraries (such as `pkg_resources`) and thus should be packaged for installation along with other files provided by the upstream project. If a project emits both `.egg-info` and `.dist-info`, both sets of metadata should be packaged (`.dist-info` is the newer standard format, but not all potential consumers of the data have been updated to read it) For more details on the other files these directories may contain, refer to PEP 376: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0376/ ================ Indeed, this is a documented feature now: http://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pkg_resources.html?highlight=_... (Jason's less opposed to it than PJE used to be) We need to use it in Fedora over pkg_resources.requires() because the latter can encounter version conflicts when there's a default version installed directly into site-packages (also documented now at the above link and in the Python packaging guide: https://packaging.python.org/multi_version_install/ ). While this mostly works reliably, we may want to alert folks to this highly confusing bug that I believe can still be triggered in some cases: https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/6 This could be changed to "Avoid easy_install", since build scripts should use the relevant install macros. Updated, I think, with references to: * https://packaging.python.org/specifications/#recording-installed-distribu... * http://setuptools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/setuptools.html * https://packaging.python.org/multi_version_install/ * https://packaging.python.org/wheel_egg/ * https://packaging.python.org/pip_easy_install/ Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan(a)gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia