Let's add a "get_metadata" API in Distutils that would return
in a dictionary the content of the .egg-info file introduced into Python
2.5.
  >>> from distutils import get_metadata
  >>> get_metadata('ThePackage')
  {..}
(Working on a prototype)

It looks like the best way to do this is to:
- make distutils.dist.DistributionMetadata also read existing egg-info files
- add get_metadata in pkgutil instead of distutils, and make it use
  distutils.dist.DistributionMetadata

heres a first simple draft, that works on .egg-info files,
(the Description extractor needs to rework, but this patch is enough to
discuss the feature)

The patch didn't install correctly using 'patch', but I manually merged
the changes into my environment (Ubuntu 8.10 running 2.5.2) - I'll
upload the diff rejections if they'll be helpful.
After installing, I attempted to use the new code to determine the
version number, and am receiving 'None' as my result.  After looking
through the code, I believe its looking for a '.egg-info' file, but my
custom package doesn't have one (it was installed using 'easy_install' -
easy_install -z <package_name>), so it looks like that info is instead
stored in EGG_INFO/PKG-INFO within the egg itself.
Here's a dir dump of my installed egg:
my_package-1.0-py2.5.egg/
|-- EGG-INFO
|   |-- PKG-INFO
|   |-- SOURCES.txt
|   |-- dependency_links.txt
|   |-- top_level.txt
|   `-- zip-safe
|-- my_package.py
`-- my_package.pyc

yes the patch doesn't treat the eggs installed with easy_install yet,
just plain distutils
I'll let you know when EGG_INFO/PKG-INFO is ready (should be in the
coming days)

I've tested it out using the straight distutils installation, and it
works great!

Is it intended that when reading PKG-INFO files the PEP 314 attributes
(provides, requires, obsoletes) are only set if version is exactly "1.1"?
I'd expected that those attributes are available regardless of the
metadata version of the parsed file (with None as default for PKG-INFO
files < 1.1).

I have improved the patch (uploaded here) (some cases are not done yet,
still work in progress)
Ray, it should work with egg generated by setuptools now, (zipped as well)
Andi, right ! -> fixed in the current patch

any chance of getting a patch that would work in 2.4?

Well since Python 2.4 doesn't have the egg-info feature, that is another
story.

There wouldn't be an easy way to read the distutils setup.py info at
all in 2.4?  i suppose i could write something specific for our
environment.
On 1/24/09, Tarek Ziadé <report@bugs.python.org> wrote:
>
>  Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek@gmail.com> added the comment:
>
>  Well since Python 2.4 doesn't have the egg-info feature, that is another
>  story.
>
>
>  _______________________________________
>  Python tracker <report@bugs.python.org>
>  <http://bugs.python.org/issue4908>
>  _______________________________________
>

This patch will be applied for the part that makes DistributionMetadata
load files.
The other part is waiting for PEP 376.

Work done in pkgutil, in the Distutils2 project, see PEP 376 for API names.

Reversing the duplicate relation with #8250 since this report has more messages.
Not reopening though, since the work is done. Kudos to Josip!

versions: + Python 3.2, - Python 3.1