The name of the module is mariadb, so when creating the tarball setuptools use the module name and the version number as directory name.
A more descriptive directory name would require to rename the name of the module.

Hi georg,

That makes sense. However, the non-descriptive directory complicates the installation documentation a bit, because we have to worry about whether the non-descriptive directory name conflicts with other directories or files that the user might have on their system.

Couldn't you fix this by keeping the module directory name like mariadb-0.9.59, but then packaging that directory in a separate top-level directory like mariadb-connector-python-0.9.59? So the tarball would look like this instead:

$ tar -tzvf mariadb-connector-python-0.9.59.tar.gz | head -n 2

drwxrwxr-x georg/georg       0 2020-05-26 01:42 mariadb-connector-python-0.9.59/

drwxrwxr-x georg/georg       0 2020-05-26 01:42 mariadb-connector-python-0.9.59/mariadb-0.9.59/

We create the tarbar with

python setup.py src

This tarball is also used for all platforms (except windows) for building the module when installing via pip.

OK, thanks!