Retrieving metadata for installed packages

[tjni]

Summary

I have a use case in which I'd like to programmatically work with the metadata for every installed package. My ideal workflow would be to run a single command:

❯ uv pip list --python <some python> --format=json --metadata-fields=name,keywords --requires
[
  {
    "name": "normalized-name",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "metadata": {
      "name": "original_name",
      "keywords": "1,2,3"
    },
    "requires": [
      { "name": "normalized-dependency-name" }
    ]
  },
  ...
]

where the --requires option is something I'm proposing in #10886.

When researching the history of this feature being asked for in pip, I stumbled across pypa/pip#11097 and pypa/pip#5261, in which the pip maintainers felt that adding this to pip list (or pip show) as JSON output was feature creep, and instead created pip inspect. Less optimal for my use case, but still quite reasonable (I can join this information in application code):

❯ uv pip list --python <some python> --format=json --requires
[
  {
    "name": "normalized-name",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "requires": [
      { "name": "normalized-dependency-name" }
    ]
  },
  ...
]

❯ uv pip inspect --python <some python>
{
  "version": "1",
  "uv_version": "0.5.24",
  "installed": [
    {
      "metadata": {
        "name": "original_name",
        "keywords": "1,2,3",
        ...
    }
  ]
  "environment": {
    ...
  }
}

I feel that this feature request shares some overlap with:

• Remaining work on uv pip show #2526
• uv info or metadata high level command (keyword: outdated) #7532

Example

No response