On 11/9/09, David Cournapeau <david@ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote: [...]
Some things are fixable in distutils: for example, to build things, you should be able to get rid of the imperative operations, and have instead of registry of extension -> action (ala scons/waf).
What is a registery of extension exactly ? Distutils let you register your own commands, you can use through the CLI. Can you provide more details ?
I'd really be shocked if a rewrite of distutils was necessary, or even necessary to simplify things.
That's the opposite of my own experience. I think I have given several reasonable examples of shortcomings of distutils: I would be glad to hear that each of them has a simple solution which is backward-compatible in distutils.
I am in for making Distutils evolve, but I need very precise real world use cases not saying that Distutils shouldn't do imperative operations). Last, I am not sure why you want only backward-compatible changes in distutils. There's no plan to keep backward-compatibility if breaking it makes DIstutils better. We will have pending deprecation warnings, that's all. Tarek