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What is a format of PyPi's requires_dist in JSON API

PyPi provides a JSON API to query information about packages. It includes a field with the package's dependencies called info/requires_dist.

Sample data (from requests package):

urllib3 (<1.27,>=1.21.1)
certifi (>=2017.4.17)
chardet (<5,>=3.0.2) ; python_version < "3"
idna (<3,>=2.5) ; python_version < "3"
charset-normalizer (~=2.0.0) ; python_version >= "3"
idna (<4,>=2.5) ; python_version >= "3"
PySocks (!=1.5.7,>=1.5.6) ; extra == 'socks'
win-inet-pton ; (sys_platform == "win32" and python_version == "2.7") and extra == 'socks'
chardet (<5,>=3.0.2) ; extra == 'use_chardet_on_py3'

What is the format of that data? Is there any documentation on it?

And more specifically: What does exactly ~= mean? And what is set of supported "variables" (like sys_platform and python_version)?

Solution

  • The spec is in https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0508/.

    An explanation of ~= is in In requirements.txt, what does tilde equals (~=) mean?.