Tarek Ziadé wrote:
no it doesn't. it's a generic tool to extend a command using plugins.
OK.
Sorry, it's too easy to say "it sucks, scratch it and re-do it" ;)
Yes, it is easy to say it sucks, but I am not saying that out of thin air. Refactoring works if the general API is ok - but that's not the case with distutils. As a data point, several people have tried to add features to distutils in numpy extensions, and I went much further than anyone else by bypassing distutils entirely, replacing the build_* commands by scons. The core codebase is ten times smaller than the original code it replaces (numpy.distutils is around 10 000 LOC, like distutils itself). I agree that in the short term, distutils should be improved, but in the long term, I don't see anything which would be both a significant improvement while staying backward compatible with distutils, if only because so many setup.py files depend on implementation details of distutils. cheers, Davud