About normalization of *.dist-info

[LecrisUT]

This issue came up recently where setuptools and hatchling/scikit-build-core either normalize or do not normalize the project name when creating the *.dist-info folder. My understanding is that this should not be an issue because tools like importlib.metadata should also do such normalization, but apparently pkg_resources.requires fails at that. The complication is also that that function is deprecated (and removed) in more recent setuptools so I cannot check it locally what is the status there.

But in short, is the normalization backed by a PEP, and if so why is it not enforced on setuptools?

Reference:

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2324959
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2338247

[henryiii]

This is a new-ish requirement in the standard: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/binary-distribution-format (though I think it's not very clearly mandated there, though that was the intent). The bug is in pkg_resources pypa/setuptools#3146, but that's deprecated so not sure if it's going to be fixed.

[LecrisUT]

Thanks for the reference. I guess it's an issue on setuptools that they should align to it. But interesting that the upstream bug in pkg_resources says that jaraco.functools is failing, but the version in EPEL9 is reported to actually pass 🤷. My thought right now is to make a symlink to satisfy the issue in that bugzilla, but I don't know if it can cause other unforeseen issues. Hopefully though this is a user issue that can be solved by using importlib.metadata.

[henryiii]

Setuptools should align with pypa/setuptools#4766.