RfC: support for older Debian releases (before bookworm)

[sarnold]

Somehow this does not affect Ubuntu focal+ which seems to build fine with all the project data in pyproject.toml, however, the github CI build for debian release fails to populate the package correctly on anything older than bookworm (using this action to build packages in a docker container).

Until things "catch up" as far as support for toml metadata the only workaround i know is a patch to move the metadata back to setup.cfg, which is fully supported for python 3.x up to current versions. The nice thing is setup.cfg is much more readable (than toml) but the not-so-nice thing is author/maintainer fields can only hold a string.

This is just something to think about for a bit.

[sarnold]

Some reference links i use for deb/python packaging:

• https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/
• https://www.cmiss.org/cmgui/wiki/BuildingUbuntuPackagesFromSource
• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpdatingADeb