On Jun 22, 2006, at 6:51 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 04:54 PM 6/22/2006 -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
In any case, I expect that having people build tools on top of setuptools is a use case you anticipated. For people to do that, they sometimes need precise specifications of behavior.
Of course -- but I didn't anticipate that they would need anything more than the ability to test whether a version matches a requirement.
I think I've explained, and I thought you understood why that wasn't adequate for me. ...
Also, at some point, one does what one can with the available manpower. Bob Ippolito was the only person besides me who was actively involved in the design process at the time -- and he was kind of like, "whatever, man" on the subject. :) It would've been nice to have had your participation then. Now, we'll pretty much have to live with what we've got.
1. You should know that no system is perfect. You can't anticipate all requirements up front. Surely, you want people to use this system beyond those who invented it. It's also not practical for all of us to get involved in every design at it's inception. 2. I have tried not to ask you to implement my use cases. There are a number of reasons for this, including: - I don't know fully what my use cases are. After all, use cases change with experience. - I don't want to disrupt setuptools development. I don't think setuptools should try to meet everyone's needs. I do think that people should be able to meet their own needs on top of setuptools. I think setuptools has stood up very well in this regard. I really haven't asked for much. I believe the only changes you've made for me so far have been bug fixes. I don't intend to ask for much. The only non-bug-fix change I've asked for so far has been to declare public a pre-exiting API so that I can implement what I want myself. Of course, I've also asked that some semantics be documented. I needed this documentation for what I was doing. I also believe that documenting things well sheds important light on them. You learn things about decisions to make by explaining these decisions to other. I think setuptools is pretty cool and I have sung it's praises in many forums, admittedly, even before I know what I was talking about. ;) I don't regret that. I'm building a "buildout" system on top of setup tools that will help it meet use cases that it doesn't meet now. I appreciate your advice and support during this process process and look forward to more of the same in the future. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@zope.com Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org