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<h1>Python Enhancement Proposals</h1>
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<section id="pep-content">
<h1 class="page-title">PEP 658 Serve Distribution Metadata in the Simple Repository API</h1>
<dl class="rfc2822 field-list simple">
<dt class="field-odd">Author<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-odd">Tzu-ping Chung &lt;uranusjr&#32;&#97;t&#32;gmail.com&gt;</dd>
<dt class="field-even">Sponsor<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-even">Brett Cannon &lt;brett&#32;&#97;t&#32;python.org&gt;</dd>
<dt class="field-odd">PEP-Delegate<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-odd">Donald Stufft &lt;donald&#32;&#97;t&#32;stufft.io&gt;</dd>
<dt class="field-even">Discussions-To<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-even"><a class="reference external" href="https://discuss.python.org/t/8651">Discourse thread</a></dd>
<dt class="field-odd">Status<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-odd"><abbr title="Normative proposal accepted for implementation">Accepted</abbr></dd>
<dt class="field-even">Type<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-even"><abbr title="Normative PEP with a new feature for Python, implementation change for CPython or interoperability standard for the ecosystem">Standards Track</abbr></dd>
<dt class="field-odd">Topic<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-odd"><a class="reference external" href="../topic/packaging/">Packaging</a></dd>
<dt class="field-even">Created<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-even">10-May-2021</dd>
<dt class="field-odd">Post-History<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-odd">10-May-2021</dd>
<dt class="field-even">Resolution<span class="colon">:</span></dt>
<dd class="field-even"><a class="reference external" href="https://discuss.python.org/t/8651/48">Discourse message</a></dd>
</dl>
<hr class="docutils" />
<section id="contents">
<details><summary>Table of Contents</summary><ul class="simple">
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#abstract">Abstract</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#motivation">Motivation</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#rationale">Rationale</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#specification">Specification</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#backwards-compatibility">Backwards Compatibility</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#rejected-ideas">Rejected Ideas</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#put-metadata-content-on-the-project-page">Put metadata content on the project page</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#expose-more-files-in-the-distribution">Expose more files in the distribution</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#explicitly-specify-the-metadata-file-s-url-on-the-project-page">Explicitly specify the metadata files URL on the project page</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#references">References</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#copyright">Copyright</a></li>
</ul>
</details></section>
<section id="abstract">
<h2><a class="toc-backref" href="#abstract" role="doc-backlink">Abstract</a></h2>
<p>This PEP proposes adding an anchor tag to expose the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">METADATA</span></code> file
from distributions in the <a class="pep reference internal" href="../pep-0503/" title="PEP 503 Simple Repository API">PEP 503</a> “simple” repository API. A
<code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-dist-info-metadata</span></code> attribute is introduced to indicate that
the file from a given distribution can be independently fetched.</p>
</section>
<section id="motivation">
<h2><a class="toc-backref" href="#motivation" role="doc-backlink">Motivation</a></h2>
<p>Package management workflows made popular by recent tooling increase
the need to inspect distribution metadata without intending to install
the distribution, and download multiple distributions of a project to
choose from based on their metadata. This means they end up discarding
much downloaded data, which is inefficient and results in a bad user
experience.</p>
</section>
<section id="rationale">
<h2><a class="toc-backref" href="#rationale" role="doc-backlink">Rationale</a></h2>
<p>Tools have been exploring methods to reduce the download size by
partially downloading wheels with HTTP range requests. This, however,
adds additional run-time requirements to the repository server. It
also still adds additional overhead, since a separate request is
needed to fetch the wheels file listing to find the correct offset to
fetch the metadata file. It is therefore desired to make the server
extract the metadata file in advance, and serve it as an independent
file to avoid the need to perform additional requests and ZIP
inspection.</p>
<p>The metadata file defined by the Core Metadata Specification
<a class="reference internal" href="#core-metadata" id="id1"><span>[core-metadata]</span></a> will be served directly by repositories since it
contains the necessary information for common use cases. The metadata
must only be served for standards-compliant distributions such as
wheels <a class="reference internal" href="#wheel" id="id2"><span>[wheel]</span></a> and sdists <a class="reference internal" href="#sdist" id="id3"><span>[sdist]</span></a>, and must be identical to the
distributions canonical metadata file, such as a wheels <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">METADATA</span></code>
file in the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">.dist-info</span></code> directory <a class="reference internal" href="#dist-info" id="id4"><span>[dist-info]</span></a>.</p>
<p>An HTML attribute on the distribution files anchor link is needed to
indicate whether a client is able to choose the separately served
metadata file. The attribute is also used to provide the metadata
contents hash for client-side verification. The attributes absence
indicates that a separate metadata entry is not available for the
distribution, either because of the distributions content, or lack of
repository support.</p>
</section>
<section id="specification">
<h2><a class="toc-backref" href="#specification" role="doc-backlink">Specification</a></h2>
<p>In a simple repositorys project page, each anchor tag pointing to a
distribution <strong>MAY</strong> have a <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-dist-info-metadata</span></code> attribute. The
presence of the attribute indicates the distribution represented by
the anchor tag <strong>MUST</strong> contain a Core Metadata file that will not be
modified when the distribution is processed and/or installed.</p>
<p>If a <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-dist-info-metadata</span></code> attribute is present, the repository
<strong>MUST</strong> serve the distributions Core Metadata file alongside the
distribution with a <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">.metadata</span></code> appended to the distributions file
name. For example, the Core Metadata of a distribution served at
<code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">/files/distribution-1.0-py3.none.any.whl</span></code> would be located at
<code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">/files/distribution-1.0-py3.none.any.whl.metadata</span></code>. This is similar
to how <a class="pep reference internal" href="../pep-0503/" title="PEP 503 Simple Repository API">PEP 503</a> specifies the GPG signature files location.</p>
<p>The repository <strong>SHOULD</strong> provide the hash of the Core Metadata file
as the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-dist-info-metadata</span></code> attributes value using the syntax
<code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">&lt;hashname&gt;=&lt;hashvalue&gt;</span></code>, where <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">&lt;hashname&gt;</span></code> is the lower cased
name of the hash function used, and <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">&lt;hashvalue&gt;</span></code> is the hex encoded
digest. The repository <strong>MAY</strong> use <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">true</span></code> as the attributes value
if a hash is unavailable.</p>
</section>
<section id="backwards-compatibility">
<h2><a class="toc-backref" href="#backwards-compatibility" role="doc-backlink">Backwards Compatibility</a></h2>
<p>If an anchor tag lacks the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-dist-info-metadata</span></code> attribute,
tools are expected to revert to their current behaviour of downloading
the distribution to inspect the metadata.</p>
<p>Older tools not supporting the new <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-dist-info-metadata</span></code>
attribute are expected to ignore the attribute and maintain their
current behaviour of downloading the distribution to inspect the
metadata. This is similar to how prior <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-</span></code> attribute additions
expect existing tools to operate.</p>
</section>
<section id="rejected-ideas">
<h2><a class="toc-backref" href="#rejected-ideas" role="doc-backlink">Rejected Ideas</a></h2>
<section id="put-metadata-content-on-the-project-page">
<h3><a class="toc-backref" href="#put-metadata-content-on-the-project-page" role="doc-backlink">Put metadata content on the project page</a></h3>
<p>Since tools generally only need dependency information from a
distribution in addition to whats already available on the project
page, it was proposed that repositories may directly include the
information on the project page, like the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-requires-python</span></code>
attribute specified in <a class="pep reference internal" href="../pep-0503/" title="PEP 503 Simple Repository API">PEP 503</a>.</p>
<p>This approach was abandoned since a distribution may contain
arbitrarily long lists of dependencies (including required and
optional), and it is unclear whether including the information for
every distribution in a project would result in net savings since the
information for most distributions generally ends up unneeded. By
serving the metadata separately, performance can be better estimated
since data usage will be more proportional to the number of
distributions inspected.</p>
</section>
<section id="expose-more-files-in-the-distribution">
<h3><a class="toc-backref" href="#expose-more-files-in-the-distribution" role="doc-backlink">Expose more files in the distribution</a></h3>
<p>It was proposed to provide the entire <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">.dist-info</span></code> directory as a
separate part, instead of only the metadata file. However, serving
multiple files in one entity through HTTP requires re-archiving them
separately after they are extracted from the original distribution
by the repository server, and there are no current use cases for files
other than <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">METADATA</span></code> when the distribution itself is not going to
be installed.</p>
<p>It should also be noted that the approach taken here does not
preclude other files from being introduced in the future, whether we
want to serve them together or individually.</p>
</section>
<section id="explicitly-specify-the-metadata-file-s-url-on-the-project-page">
<h3><a class="toc-backref" href="#explicitly-specify-the-metadata-file-s-url-on-the-project-page" role="doc-backlink">Explicitly specify the metadata files URL on the project page</a></h3>
<p>An early version of this draft proposed putting the metadata files
URL in the <code class="docutils literal notranslate"><span class="pre">data-dist-info-metadata</span></code> attribute. But people feel it
is better for discoverability to require the repository to serve the
metadata file at a determined location instead. The current approach
also has an additional benefit of making the project page smaller.</p>
</section>
</section>
<section id="references">
<h2><a class="toc-backref" href="#references" role="doc-backlink">References</a></h2>
<div role="list" class="citation-list">
<div class="citation" id="core-metadata" role="doc-biblioentry">
<dt class="label" id="core-metadata">[<a href="#id1">core-metadata</a>]</dt>
<dd><a class="reference external" href="https://packaging.python.org/specifications/core-metadata/">https://packaging.python.org/specifications/core-metadata/</a></div>
<div class="citation" id="dist-info" role="doc-biblioentry">
<dt class="label" id="dist-info">[<a href="#id4">dist-info</a>]</dt>
<dd><a class="reference external" href="https://packaging.python.org/specifications/recording-installed-packages/">https://packaging.python.org/specifications/recording-installed-packages/</a></div>
<div class="citation" id="wheel" role="doc-biblioentry">
<dt class="label" id="wheel">[<a href="#id2">wheel</a>]</dt>
<dd><a class="reference external" href="https://packaging.python.org/specifications/binary-distribution-format/">https://packaging.python.org/specifications/binary-distribution-format/</a></div>
<div class="citation" id="sdist" role="doc-biblioentry">
<dt class="label" id="sdist">[<a href="#id3">sdist</a>]</dt>
<dd><a class="reference external" href="https://packaging.python.org/specifications/source-distribution-format/">https://packaging.python.org/specifications/source-distribution-format/</a></div>
</div>
</section>
<section id="copyright">
<h2><a class="toc-backref" href="#copyright" role="doc-backlink">Copyright</a></h2>
<p>This document is placed in the public domain or under the
CC0-1.0-Universal license, whichever is more permissive.</p>
</section>
</section>
<hr class="docutils" />
<p>Source: <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/python/peps/blob/main/peps/pep-0658.rst">https://github.com/python/peps/blob/main/peps/pep-0658.rst</a></p>
<p>Last modified: <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/python/peps/commits/main/peps/pep-0658.rst">2023-10-13 05:15:59 GMT</a></p>
</article>
<nav id="pep-sidebar">
<h2>Contents</h2>
<ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#abstract">Abstract</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#motivation">Motivation</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#rationale">Rationale</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#specification">Specification</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#backwards-compatibility">Backwards Compatibility</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#rejected-ideas">Rejected Ideas</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#put-metadata-content-on-the-project-page">Put metadata content on the project page</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#expose-more-files-in-the-distribution">Expose more files in the distribution</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#explicitly-specify-the-metadata-file-s-url-on-the-project-page">Explicitly specify the metadata files URL on the project page</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#references">References</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#copyright">Copyright</a></li>
</ul>
<br>
<a id="source" href="https://github.com/python/peps/blob/main/peps/pep-0658.rst">Page Source (GitHub)</a>
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