On 30 March 2015 at 16:26, Ian Cordasco <graffatcolmingov@gmail.com> wrote:
A waste of time? No. But it sure is poor investment of time for newbie users. It's a futile struggle to document (or read about) all the features of distutils and setuptools, not because it can't be documented, but because there's too much ground to cover and PyPA's packaging.python.org approach is to just give an overview of what's available and avoid giving any real best practice recommendations as much as possible. There may be good reasons for that but that's not a sensible approach to giving users a "pitfall free" learning path.
So for new python programmers (or newbie users in general) reading the entire source of another package to understand it is a better experience?
Note that if you want a copy-and-paste level "quick start" setup.py, https://github.com/pypa/sampleproject is basically what you want. The packaging user guide uses it as its recommended starting point. If you don't like it, that probably means you already have enough knowledge to write your own version :-) Paul