Check Reference

This page describes each of the checks that pydistcheck performs. The section headings correspond to the error codes printed in pydistcheck’s output.

distro-too-large-compressed

The package distribution is larger (compressed) than the allowed size.

Change that limit using configuration option max-distro-size-compressed.

distro-too-large-uncompressed

The package distribution is larger (uncompressed) than the allowed size.

Change that limit using configuration option max-distro-size-uncompressed.

files-only-differ-by-case

The package distribution contains filepaths which are identical after lowercasing.

Such paths are not portable, as some filesystems (notably macOS), are case-insensitive.

path-contains-non-ascii-characters

At least one filepath in the package distribution contains non-ASCII characters.

Non-ASCII characters are not portable, and their inclusion in filepaths can lead to installation and usage issues on different platforms.

For more information, see:

• “Archives Containing Non-ASCII Filenames” (Oracle docs)

• example issue from pillow/PIL

• “Unix and non-ASCII file names, a summary of issues”

path-contains-spaces

At least one filepath in the package distribution contains spaces.

Filepaths with spaces require special treatment, like quoting in some settings. Avoiding paths with spaces eliminates a whole class of potential issues related to software that doesn’t handle such paths well.

For more information, see:

• “Long filenames or paths with spaces require quotation marks” (Windows docs)

• “Don’t use spaces or underscores in file paths” (blog post)

• “What technical reasons exist for not using space characters in file names?” (Stack Overflow)

too-many-files

The package distribution contains more than the allowed number of files.

This is a very very rough way to detect that unexpected files have been included in a new release of a project.

pydistcheck defaults to raising this error when a distribution has more than 2000 files…a totally arbitrary number chosen by the author.

To change that limit, use configuration option max-allowed-files.