Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 10:54 PM 9/24/2008 +0200, Christophe Combelles wrote:
there are a LOT of other improvements that are already wanted, such as support for other (d)vcs,
Note, by the way, that the reason most of the items listed as "feature" or "wish" on the tracker are in those statuses are because nobody has proposed a design for critique. Usually, it's just wishes for magic ponies (e.g. uninstall, post-install hooks, etc.) without any discussion of how to deal with the edge cases, interactions, or other negative consequences of said features. (magic pony manure?)
I sincerely hope that things will speed-up with this fork.
I imagine they might speed up, but likely at the cost of stability. If anybody knew enough to be able to add these features in a safe way, then they knew enough to be able to contribute patches to setuptools (after first proposing how they would handle all the nasty edge cases).
I agree, in that we must not add features without careful thought as to their impact and cross-platform support. Python is a conservative community and we've seen value in the role of an gatekeeper who sees the bigger picture, as Guido and others for other projects. Of course, a gatekeeper who is too-strict isn't good either - there must be balance. But to the distribute project, because of the nature of standardizing package technology, running this is a huge responsibility. Please do not start adding all features asked for without considering their tradeoffs. One issue with something like setuptools is that packaging APIs get immortalized in setup.py files that are not easy to go back and change, so the APIs must carry heavy backward compatibility baggage. You may want to consider using PEPs as a basis for discussing change requests. They're not just for the core Python language. -Jeff