PEP 376 has just been accepted. This is a very important step in the packaging work we have been doing during the last year.

This PEP introduces a database of installed distributions, and therefore a standard that allows interoperability among all tools.

To summarize, a distribution that gets installed will have to create a .dist-info directory in Python, containing these files:

METADATA : contains the project metadata, as described in PEP 345, PEP 314 and PEP 241.

: contains the project metadata, as described in PEP 345, PEP 314 and PEP 241. RECORD : records the list of installed files

: records the list of installed files INSTALLER : records the name of the tool used to install the project

: records the name of the tool used to install the project REQUESTED : the presence of this file indicates that the project installation was explicitly requested (i.e., not installed as a dependency).

Python will provide in the pkgutil module, a set of APIs that can be used to query installed projects. This ressembles a lot to what the Setuptools project currently provides with its pkg_resources module.

An interesting side-effect of the RECORD file is that package managers will be able to uininstall projects. As a matter of fact Distutils2 will provide a basic uninstall feature on the top of the pkgutil APIs, and I hope tools like Pip (that already provide this feature) will adopt the new standard.

This small PEP is the basis to a new PEP that is coming next, which will define a standard to describe and consume resource files in Python projects. The ultimate goal will be to be able to get rid of setup.py and describe everything in static configuration files in your project. But this is another story 😉

Thanks to all people involved in this PEP, and in particular, thanks to Philip J. Eby for his help (PEP 376 is massively based on what he has created in Setuptools.)