Metadata-Version

Version of the file format; currently “1.0” is the only legal value here.

Example:

Metadata-Version: 1.0

Name

The name of the package.

Example:

Name: BeagleVote

Version

A string containing the package’s version number. This field should be parseable by one of the Version classes (StrictVersion or LooseVersion) in the distutils.version module.

Example:

Version: 1.0a2

Platform (multiple use)

A comma-separated list of platform specifications, summarizing the operating systems supported by the package. The major supported platforms are listed below, but this list is necessarily incomplete.

POSIX, MacOS, Windows, BeOS, Palm OS.

Binary distributions will use the Supported-Platform field in their metadata to specify the OS and CPU for which the binary package was compiled. The semantics of the Supported-Platform are not specified in this PEP.

Example:

Platform: POSIX, Windows

Summary

A one-line summary of what the package does.

Example:

Summary: A module for collecting votes from beagles.

Description (optional)

A longer description of the package that can run to several paragraphs. (Software that deals with metadata should not assume any maximum size for this field, though one hopes that people won’t include their instruction manual as the long-description.)

Example:

Description: This module collects votes from beagles
             in order to determine their electoral wishes.
             Do NOT try to use this module with basset hounds;
             it makes them grumpy.

Keywords (optional)

A list of additional keywords to be used to assist searching for the package in a larger catalog.

Example:

Keywords: dog puppy voting election

Home-page (optional)

A string containing the URL for the package’s home page.

Example:

Home-page: http://www.example.com/~cschultz/bvote/

Author (optional)

A string containing at a minimum the author’s name. Contact information can also be added, separating each line with newlines.

Example:

Author: C. Schultz
        Universal Features Syndicate
        Los Angeles, CA

Author-email

A string containing the author’s e-mail address. It can contain a name and e-mail address in the legal forms for a RFC 822 ‘From:’ header. It’s not optional because cataloging systems can use the e-mail portion of this field as a unique key representing the author. A catalog might provide authors the ability to store their GPG key, personal home page, and other additional metadata about the author, and optionally the ability to associate several e-mail addresses with the same person. Author-related metadata fields are not covered by this PEP.

Example:

Author-email: "C. Schultz" <cschultz@example.com>

License

A string selected from a short list of choices, specifying the license covering the package. Some licenses result in the software being freely redistributable, so packagers and resellers can automatically know that they’re free to redistribute the software. Other licenses will require a careful reading by a human to determine how the software can be repackaged and resold.

The choices are:

Artistic, BSD, DFSG, GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, "MIT",
Mozilla PL, "public domain", Python, Qt PL, Zope PL, unknown,
nocommercial, nosell, nosource, shareware, other

Definitions of some of the licenses are:

Some of these licenses can be interpreted to mean the software is freely redistributable. The list of redistributable licenses is:

Artistic, BSD, DFSG, GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, "MIT",
Mozilla PL, "public domain", Python, Qt PL, Zope PL,
nosource, shareware

Note that being redistributable does not mean a package qualifies as free software, ‘nosource’ and ‘shareware’ being examples.

Example:

License: MIT