
Tres Seaver wrote:
Bugfixes which break backward compatibility in "minor" relaseses are "major" fouls, period.
Sure, but what does backward compatibility even mean for distutils ? Not much, as any non trivial extension needs to use undocumented implementation details.
As PJE points out, the particular bugfix in question *also* broke other packages (pywin32), which means that it can't be just that setuptools is "unmaintained"
No, it is a consequence of distutils design and implementation. I think those breakages are unavoidable if you touch distutils besides trivial bug fixes (and the list of trivial things you can do to distutils without breaking anything is tiny). I already had to adapt numpy.distutils numerous times when distutils changed, so I don't think it is fair to point this particular issue as a major foul. It should be accepted that people relying on distutils internals (that is almost anybody using distutils extensions, especially for compiled code) will have to constantly change their code IMHO. cheers, David