On Wed, 19 Sep 2018 at 10:54, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
Given that, and assuming Vinay is amenable to the idea, it would be nice to revisit the concept of the two layer architecture, with packaging as the lower level minimalist strictly standards compliant layer, and distlib as the higher level general purpose toolkit that brings together various other libraries (including packaging itself) under a more comprehensive API.
I'd certainly be OK with delegating more of the "common activities" to distlib. But it's a *long* way from being simple to do so, and pip would need to take a lot of care to ensure that doing so didn't result in behavioural differences. Also, we'd need to be careful of dumping too much on distlib without making the sustainability problem even worse - at the moment, as far as I know, Vinay is the sole distlib developer. Paul