Tarek, I wouldn't take "feedback" as all bad.... Indirectly, it seems like you are telling people not to report their experience. Indirectly, it seems like you are discouraging thinking about what could be done to improve things. Here, we have a popular saying "Nothing ever gets fixed if people don't complain." A roadmap is a good idea... I think distutils needs one... David On Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:34:06 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

Remainder about Distutils:

- we did a summit at Pycon about distutils - some people started to work on various tasks (PEPs, etc)

Can everyone here who says "distutils sucks" "setuptools sucks", "let's rewrite them from scratch" hear that:

Just join the work in progress, help on the PEP, uses cases, and stop whining about the situation !!!!

Thank you

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:11 AM, David Lyon wrote:

Tarek,

I wouldn't take "feedback" as all bad....

Indirectly, it seems like you are telling people not to report their experience. Indirectly, it seems like you are discouraging thinking about what could be done to improve things.

I am encouraging people to work with the people that have started to work on various topics durong Pycon

Here, we have a popular saying "Nothing ever gets fixed if people don't complain."

A roadmap is a good idea...

I think distutils needs one...

The rough roadmap was expressed during pycon main page : http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils main topics: - have a standard version comparison API - http://wiki.python.org/moin/DistutilsVersionFight - standardize egg-info: http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/StandardizeEggInfo - finalize the new PEP 345 - http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/Metadata - work on the static metadata concept - http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/StaticMetadata - work on extendding commands - http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/ManifestPluginSystem/Draft

David

On Tue, 21 Apr 2009 09:34:06 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

...

Remainder about Distutils:

- we did a summit at Pycon about distutils - some people started to work on various tasks (PEPs, etc)

Can everyone here who says "distutils sucks" "setuptools sucks", "let's rewrite them from scratch" hear that:

Just join the work in progress, help on the PEP, uses cases, and stop whining about the situation !!!!

Thank you

_______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig

-- Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org

2009/4/21 Tarek Ziadé :

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:11 AM, David Lyon wrote:

...

Tarek,

I wouldn't take "feedback" as all bad....

Indirectly, it seems like you are telling people not to report their experience. Indirectly, it seems like you are discouraging thinking about what could be done to improve things.

I am encouraging people to work with the people that have started to work on various topics durong Pycon

Given that I have not got the time or experience with setuptools or distutils to contribute effort to fixing things, you seem to be saying that my experience as an end user of these tools, and my spending my time trying to understand the implications of the proposals so that I can offer useful feedback, is not of interest. So be it. I'll stop commenting. Please let me know when "the work" is complete, and end user feedback (or "whining", if you prefer) is welcome again. Paul.

2009/4/21 Tarek Ziadé :

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 12:37 PM, Paul Moore wrote:

...

2009/4/21 Tarek Ziadé :

...

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 11:11 AM, David Lyon wrote:

...

Tarek,

I wouldn't take "feedback" as all bad....

Indirectly, it seems like you are telling people not to report their experience. Indirectly, it seems like you are discouraging thinking about what could be done to improve things.

I am encouraging people to work with the people that have started to work on various topics durong Pycon

Given that I have not got the time or experience with setuptools or distutils to contribute effort to fixing things, you seem to be saying that my experience as an end user of these tools, and my spending my time trying to understand the implications of the proposals so that I can offer useful feedback, is not of interest.

I have never said that. On the contrary, I encourage you to fill your use case as an end user in the wiki. [...] I think you misunderstood my point.

Hmm, OK. If that's the case then I should apologise. I am struggling to understand the details of all these discussion threads, and that probably coloured my response. One concrete point - The categories on the wiki don't really give me much help in knowing where to put my use case. I'm a user of Python packages - all I care about is running the installer, or if I must typing python setup.py bdist_wininst. So these aren't relevant, as they are developer-oriented: DistutilsVersionFight Distutils/StandardizeEggInfo Distutils/Metadata Distutils/StaticMetadata Distutils/ManifestPluginSystem Distutils/TestingInfrastructure This might be relevant, as it sounds like it relates to ensuring that bdist_wininst installers are available. But it sounds more like it's about maintaining bdist_wininst outside of the core - so I'm not sure where I'd state that as a user I don't want to have to download a 3rd-party bdist_wininst before I can build my own packages if there isn't a Windows installer. It sounds like there's an implicit assumption there that I disagree with :-( Distutils/Friends : the goal is to try to find a project, a person or a group of person on each platform that is willing to maintain a third-party tool that build system-specific distros out of python package. Ultimately, though, my "use case" is simple. I want to download and install Windows platform-specific installers for each package I use, without needing to care about distutils or setuptools. To the extent that I am exposed to the existence of distutils/setuptools (beyond the utterly bare minimum of "python setup.py bdist_wininst"), my requirement isn't being met - and I'll happily discuss whether I should expect to lower my expectations, and what benefits there are (to me, or others) in doing so. But that's it. The sticking point here is that before setuptools, *my requirements were largely being met*. Since setuptools appeared on the scene, they are being eroded (witness projects which have switched to distributing eggs rather than bdist_wininst installers). From that fact stems all of my anti-setuptools views and comments (which I won't repeat now). FWIW, I did post my use case here some days ago, with a request that someone suggest/find a home for it on the wiki, as I wasn't sure where it went. To my knowledge, no-one ever did that. I'd still appreciate it if someone could copy it to the wiki. But trying to understand the various threads and arguments on the list has sapped most of my energy, so I'm not going to try to guess where it should go. Paul.