Jason R. Coombs <jar...@jaraco.com> added the comment:

Thanks for the report.

Yes, the issues are related, where .version and .name returning None are 
specific manifestations of the metadata not having that key and the behavior 
being ill-defined.

I haven't yet decided if metadata items being undefined should result in None 
or raise an Exception (maybe KeyError).

For the specific case of a missing Name or Version, however, the packaging spec 
says that these fields are required 
(https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/core-metadata/#core-metadata-specifications),
 so it may be reasonable for the behavior when the specification is not met 
that the resulting behavior would be undefined (i.e. importlib.metadata should 
be able to assume the specification). It's outside the scope of 
importlib.metadata to detect, report, and repair invalid metadata. I would 
welcome and even encourage a third-party package to take on the responsibility 
of validating all distributions in an environment and reporting on 
non-compliant aspects.

In that sense, the type declaration is correct. `.name` and `.version` should 
always return `str` or raise an exception.

This additional example leads me stronger toward the position that 
`.metadata[missing]` should raise a KeyError, which would also fix this issue.

I'd also argue that if the metadata file is missing altogether, that should 
perhaps be a different error. That is, missing metadata is different from null 
metadata. Right now, the two are indistinguishable from the interface.

> I'd expect there to be a PackageNotFoundError raised in this situation

That doesn't sound quite right to me. If there's a `.dist-info` directory, that 
implies a package is present. e.g.:

```
~ $ mkdir foo.dist-info
~ $ py -c "import importlib.metadata as md; print(md.distribution('foo'))"
<importlib.metadata.PathDistribution object at 0x1032f8580>
```

I'm going to ponder this one some more and probably address the `.metadata` 
issue(s) first before making any pronouncements on the best approach here.

----------

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Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue47060>
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