On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 10:36 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote: [..]
It does feel something like that. The build system is just one of the problems with distutils' internals, in my experience. You can think of the rest of distutils as a little application framework for command line utilities. I think this framework simply fails to provide in very fundamental ways, like the "extend commands by subclassing" design pattern. That choice makes it fundamentally difficult to combine extensions together. I really don't see a way to evolve away from that (and believe me, over the last decade, I've tried). You just need to redesign the internals if you want to get away from that. You can't get from any point A to any point B by evolving in small steps that are functional (not to mention backwards compatible!) all the way through.
I am very surprised about this statement. What did you tried for the paste decade and failed to do ? I hear some complaints since a week, but beside's David examples I didn't read any other precise use cases. We're looking through the build_ext use case, and we are making some improvement on the other thread. So why not doing this in other issues ? Let's discuss your use case. And if it means adding new options to run arbitrary commands like post/pre hooks to a given command, to avoid subclassing an existing command, let's do it. And let's drop the backward compat issues in these discussions, so we don't burn out in details. Tarek