[Distutils] "setup.py needs to go away" (was [PEP 376] - Open questions on python-dev)

[Jim Fulton]

On Jul 10, 2009, at 1:21 AM, David Cournapeau wrote:
> I think it is important that people who come from different  
> communities
> participate to this: people who work on web development have problems
> which are mostly orthogonal to mine, but I get the impression that  
> most
> people on distutils-sig fall in this category.


I don't think this perspective is reflective so much of web  
development as of application development.  Those of us who work on  
web applications need to provide working applications, often with hard  
scalability and reliability requirements.  We need to have control  
over how our applications are assembled so we can test known  
configurations and deploy them in a repeatable way. I think this would  
apply equally well to other sorts of applications.

Other folks are focussed on making libraries available to a large  
audience of developers and sometimes even end users.  For example, I  
guess that numpy and a lot of related tools are often or usually used  
in ad hoc one-off scripts for analysis of data.  Here flexibility is  
king.  System Python installations tend to serve these needs fairly  
well, especially if certain packages are tricky to install.  I often  
use matplotlib to do data analysis.  For this, using my ubuntu system  
Python's install works pretty well.  (This is partly because  
matplotlib is hard to install using normal egg mechanisms due to some  
sniffing it does.)

I agree that distutils is a mess and with your desire to separate  
concerns so that people can make progress in different areas without  
stepping on each other.

Jim

--
Jim Fulton
Zope Corporation