On 17 July 2013 19:46, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:

You're not getting rid of sdists are you?

There are as-yet unspecified plans for a sdist 2.0 format. It is expected to fulfil the same role as current sdist, though, so no need to worry.

Please note that without source distributions (preferably .tar.gz) your
package will never get distributed on a Linux distro.

Understood. I expect Nick is fully aware of the implications here :-)

Maybe the keyword here is "traditional" though. In that case, keep in mind
that at least in Debian and its derivatives, we have a lot of tools that make
it pretty trivial to package something setup.py based from PyPI. If/when that
goes away, it will be more difficult to get new package updates, until the
distro's supporting tools catch up.

The long-term intent is to remove executable setup.py. When this happens, definitely consumers (end users, Python tools like pip, and distro packaging systems) will have some migration work to do. Keeping that manageable will definitely be important. But doing nothing and staying where we are isn't really an option, so we'll have to accept and manage the pain.

Paul