setuptools changes underscore to dash for package name

[LorenLiu]

After I pip install cx_oracle, I use python -m pip show cx_oracle command and it shows the package name is cx-Oracle
After discussed with cx_Oracle's author, it shows setuptools changed the underscore to dash for the package name. Is that an issue for setuptools or is there any way to stop this auto-conversion? Thanks.

setup.cfg for cx_Oracle
[metadata]
name = cx_Oracle

PKG-INFO for cx_Oracle
Metadata-Version: 2.1
Name: cx-Oracle

setup.py used in cx_Oracel

setup the extension

extension = setuptools.Extension(
name = "cx_Oracle",
include_dirs = includeDirs,
extra_compile_args = extraCompileArgs,
define_macros = [("CXO_BUILD_VERSION", BUILD_VERSION)],
extra_link_args = extraLinkArgs,
sources = sources + dpiSources,
depends = depends,
libraries = libraries,
library_dirs = libraryDirs)

[jaraco]

It looks like when Setuptools resolves the name for the metadata, it uses pkg_resources.safe_name, referencing the "[unspecified] standard distribution name" that replaces underscores with dashes.

But looking at recent PEPs like PEP 508, it does look like Names are allowed to contain underscores.

Probably egg_info needs to be updated to allow for underscores (and anything else allowed be the new standard). Who knows what havoc that will wreak.

[sztomi]

This is still an issue.

[livein21st]

This is still an issue for me as well

[jaraco]

I can confirm that with #4159, the issue is addressed:

 setuptools bugfix/2522-retain-valid-name @ .tox/py/bin/pip install --no-cache --no-build-isolation cx-oracle
Collecting cx-oracle
  Downloading cx_Oracle-8.3.0.tar.gz (363 kB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 363.9/363.9 kB 8.8 MB/s eta 0:00:00
  Preparing metadata (pyproject.toml) ... done
Building wheels for collected packages: cx-oracle
  Building wheel for cx-oracle (pyproject.toml) ... done
  Created wheel for cx-oracle: filename=cx_Oracle-8.3.0-cp312-cp312-macosx_14_0_arm64.whl size=178447 sha256=36d93f88ded91ec3726325bc9bb1c2de6493af624c9acecefbe22fadd5de3554
  Stored in directory: /private/var/folders/sx/n5gkrgfx6zd91ymxr2sr9wvw00n8zm/T/pip-ephem-wheel-cache-5slq_i5v/wheels/c2/36/74/ca03900db8246dfd872cb23f51299a034ff843b7c15e87b5dd
Successfully built cx-oracle
Installing collected packages: cx-oracle
Successfully installed cx-oracle-8.3.0
 setuptools bugfix/2522-retain-valid-name @ head -n 3 .tox/py/lib/python3.12/site-packages/cx_Oracle-8.3.0.dist-info/METADATA
Metadata-Version: 2.1
Name: cx_Oracle
Version: 8.3.0

[jaraco]

Releasing as v69.0.3.

[sztomi]

Thank you!

[johannkm]

Just a heads up: we were accidentally relying on underscores becoming hyphens, I suspect other projects will hit this as well 🙂

[henryiii]

Build was checking metadata in its test suite, but happy to adapt to this.

By the way, I think this affects SDist naming (SDist names should be normalized, but setuptools doesn't seem to do that). We got a report of an SDist being made with spaces in the name, which is invalid. I'm suspecting this change might be related.

# setup.cfg
[metadata]
name = This is not cool
version = 0.0.1

$ touch pyproject.toml
$ pipx run build .
...
Successfully built This is not cool-0.0.1.tar.gz and This_is_not_cool-0.0.1-py3-none-any.whl

I believe before this change, you'd have made this-is-not-cool-0.0.1.tar.gz (which should have been this_is_not_cool-0.0.1.tar.gz, normalized like wheels, IMO, and as far as I've been told, all other backends normalize that way). The file with spaces in it is invalid on PyPI. The upload failure even tells you Start filename for 'Zipped-Album-Player' with 'zipped_album_player'.