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11 PEP 301: Package Index and Metadata for Distutils

Support for the long-requested Python catalog makes its first appearance in 2.3.

The heart of the catalog is the new Distutils `register` command. Running `python setup.py register` will collect the metadata describing a package, such as its name, version, maintainer, description, &c., and send it to a central catalog server. The resulting catalog is available from http://www.python.org/pypi.

To make the catalog a bit more useful, a new optional classifiers keyword argument has been added to the Distutils `setup()` function. A list of Trove-style strings can be supplied to help classify the software.

Here's an example setup.py with classifiers, written to be compatible with older versions of the Distutils:

    from distutils import core
    kw = {'name': "Quixote",
          'version': "0.5.1",
          'description': "A highly Pythonic Web application framework",
          # ...
          }

    if (hasattr(core, 'setup_keywords') and
        'classifiers' in core.setup_keywords):
        kw['classifiers'] = \
            ['Topic :: Internet :: WWW/HTTP :: Dynamic Content',
             'Environment :: No Input/Output (Daemon)',
             'Intended Audience :: Developers'],

    core.setup(**kw)

The full list of classifiers can be obtained by running `python setup.py register --list-classifiers`.

See Also:

PEP 301, Package Index and Metadata for Distutils
  Written and implemented by Richard Jones.