[Distutils] Supporting extensibility in disutils

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

I'd like it to be possible to add additional commands to distutils with 
modifying distutils itself or the setup.py file included with packages.  I 
don't think this needs to be a particularly risky change.

The use case is to allow additional commands to be added for all distutils 
setup.py scripts, or to replace commands with site-specific.  This could then 
be used to support alternate bdist_* flavors (either for additional types of 
packages or alternate implementations for currently supported package types).  
It could also be used to provide alternate implementations of existing 
commands to support alternate policies.

Specifically, I propose that distutils should be extended to search for an 
implementation class across a list of packages instead of only 
distutils.command, keeping distutils.command as the default entry in the 
list.  Additional packages could be identified using a command line option or 
configuration data.

I'm willing to work up a patch for this; are there any objections to adding 
this functionality in Python 2.4?  (I'd like to have this in the coming alpha 
if at all possible.)


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>