David Lyon wrote:
The parts that shouldn't be rewritten (because the people that wrote it were too clever - and the degree of difficulty to high) is any C interface.
Not exactly sure what you mean by that. If you mean the knowledge of how to call the C compiler to compile an extension module on various platforms, I agree that this is important knowledge that should be preserved. But if the only way to preserve it is to keep the actual existing distutils code that implements it, we have a problem, because that IMO is the part of distutils that *most* needs improvement. It needs to be broken out of the monolithic build_ext class somehow so that the build_ext process can be extended more selectively.
Evolution is better than revolution is better than nothing happening at all.
I don't agree that evolution is better in and of itself than revolution. They're both means to an end -- getting something better than we have now. The problem with distutils is that evolution doesn't seem to have worked. It has just grown randomly with no clear design and ended up painting itself into a corner. -- Greg