(Frozen release plans) Progress to 4.0

This issue should track the progress to the next major release and provide a place to have discussions about features.

Features

• Improve argparse #87
• Move to package structure #88

Ideas

• Add support for PEP 639 -> SPDX license tags
• Update PrettyTable dependency #82
• Move from cli only application to cli + lib #81
• Add typing + type checking (mypy)
• Improve CI test -> add environment caching
• Add ability to specify options in setup.cfg
• Improve usage for CI license validation -> add some sort of license pinning
• Add support for importlib.metadata (Python 3.8 and up). Replaces get_installed_distributions
• Add authors file
• Add settings files for VS Code
• Support multiple license files per package

The ideas are subject to change and might not all get implemented. I’ll move ideas to the feature column once a PR is created.

Discussions

Add flake8, pylint Those checks are relatively easy to add and might at some code quality improvements. At least the provide useful guides when used with IDEs (eg. VS Code)

Require Python 3.7 I’m not completely sure about this one. But some good arguments in favor

• Python 3.6 will be deprecated at the end of the year
• The switch to 3.7 would allow the use of Data classes and Postponed evaluation of annotations, the last being very helpful (but not required) for type annotations.
• The move to 4.0 will already be a breaking change, so it would be easy to add it on.
• Most users will most likely support Python 3.7 and up, given it’s already three years old
• Users that require Python 3.6 can still use the current version which works perfectly fine. They will probably upgrade soon anyway.

[cdce8p]

Today, I added the following commit to my master branch.

• Updated development dependencies to resolve security alerts.

  • d863b9f

• Fixing broken test cases.

  • 0d2d1d7
  • a585b30
  • 6c5b54b

dev-4.0 branch has also been rebased from the latest master branch. The test cases have priority over the code in the dev-4.0 branch.

Thanks for the heads up. I unfortunately don’t have much that free time to work on it at the moment, although I do plan to come back to it at some point.

The last few weeks I’ve worked on a few improvements for setuptools that will ultimately also help us here once they are widely adopted. That includes

• Correctly escape the License metadata field. Previously, multiline licenses would almost certainly have broken the metadata file.
• The license_files option now supports glob patterns, overwrites any manifest settings and has reasonable defaults if not specified. That should help many projects with including their license files in the source distribution. wheel does include something similar for the build distribution.
• Added support for the License-File metadata field. That should help finding the relevant licensing files in a package. https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/pull/2645

[cdce8p]

Note: I have a security alert from dependabot and have updated the dev-requirements.txt . So, dev-4.0.0 has been rebased to commit 7dba43c and force pushed.

Thanks for letting me know!