[Distutils] [Distribute] project status

[Tarek Ziadé]

Hello,

We are going to freeze our bug fix work on the code and focus on
testing/documenting the release that we are planning to publish at
PyPI asap.

The list of bugs we've fixed are listed here :
http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/wiki/bug_listing
If you feel that we forgot an important bug from the list we didn't
mirror yet, please let us know. Notice that we won't be able to fix
them
all now, and that we will have 0.6.x maintenance releases for that.

The first release will ship the same package/modules and will
overwrite an existing setuptools installation.

The tasks we will do now are:

- write a documentation on how to switch to distribute. This document
will explain the steps to use
  the distribution in a setuptools-based setup.py project or in a
zc.buildout environment.
  For the latter, this will probably require us to provide a custom
bootstrap.py script.

- write a documentation on how to uninstall distribute, if the user
want to go back to setuptools.
  (it's a friendly fork, we don't want to mess things up)

- write a roadmap document, explaining the plans for 0.7 and 0.8, so
the people that are installing 0.6 will
  know where they are heading.

- do extensive tests under various environment/contexts to see how
things work, and to validate that the
  upgrade/install scenarii are working well.  We will try to write
functional tests for that so we can replay
  them. This is very important, especially because the test coverage
in setuptools is very low right now.

- produce a tarball archive so people that wish to help can try out on
their side

Once we feel that the code is ready and enough tested, we will publish
'Distribute 0.6 (or whatever the name become)'
Except this release sometimes next week.

Extra steps if we have time :

- set up a buildbot
- more documentation
- improving test coverage


Cheers
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org