Glossary¶

binary distribution: An archive of the installable files of a particular version of a project, produced using one of the python setup.py bdist_* commands.
development egg: An checkout of the development sources of of a project, added to Python’s system path using the python setup.py develop command.
extra: Additional “tags” on a requirement, indicating a dependency on optional features of the project. See the pkg_resources Requirements Parsing documentation for more.
package index: A web page listing projects known to the index, where each project has a separate URL listing distributions (source or binary) in the index for each release of the project. This is the format of the simple API of the Python Package Index: http://pypi.python.org/simple/
project: A named collection of releases of a given Python library or application, packaged using distutils or one of its derivatives.
release: A numbered version of a project released as software, normally as one or more distributions (source or binary).
requirement: A string specifying a distutils project name. Can be optionally restricted to a given version or range of versions.
source distribution: An archive of the sources of a particular version of a project, produced using python setup.py sdist.

References¶

Many of these terms derive their semantics from the following documentation: