On Fri, Oct 20, 2017, at 12:50 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
* Since it is a packaging standard, then it is expected that all packaging tools will be updated to work with it.
Where packaging tools need to know about it, they already have to. Where they don't, writing a standard doesn't imply that every tool has to implement it. Documenting it doesn't change either case, it just makes life easier for tools that do need to use it.
* We’re explicitly saying that this is the one true way of solving this problem in the Python ecosystem.
I don't buy that at all. We're saying that it exists, and this is what it is.
* We stifle innovation (hell just including it in setutools at all does this, but we can’t unopen that can of worms).
I don't think that's true to any significant extent. Having a standard does not stop people coming up with something better.
* We make it actively harder to improve the feature (since once it’s part of the purview of packaging standards, all of distutils-sig gets to weigh in on improvements).
It hasn't changed in years, as far as I know, and it's so widely used that any change is likely to break a load of stuff anyway. As we've already discussed for caching, we can improve by building *on top* of it relatively easily. And ultimately I think that bringing it out into daylight leads to a healthier future than leaving it under the stone marked 'setuptools''.