PEP 658: Static Distribution Metadata in the Simple Repository API

[uranusjr (Tzu-ping Chung)]

@steve.dower

I’m not convinced including the metadata version is helpful - what am I (as a resolver tool) supposed to do with it? Reject a package entirely? As soon as I decide to get the metadata, I’m going to find out the format/version, and I can’t think of anything useful to do any earlier.

It’s not the metadata version, but the distribution format version. This determines how a tool can actually make sense of the bytes sent by the server that’s supposed to be the metadata file.

But if tool authors are having trouble understanding its use, that’s a strong sign it’s not only not (yet) needed, but also won’t be correctly used. Since that attribute can be retrospectively defined anyway (as mentioned above), I’ll leave it out

@pganssle

Is this intending to explicitly rule out serving PEP 643 metadata files? If so, why?

I was actually trying to rule out PEP 621 so people don’t get the wrong idea and start exposing pyproject.toml (which is not distribution metadata, but many people including tool authors confuse them). You’re right, PEP 621 should be allowed. Any suggestions how I can improve the wording to include the right things (and only them)?