On 30 March 2000, Joe Van Andel said:

I updated my distutils from cvs and installed them. Now, when I try to build my application, I get:

[...]

"/usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages/distutils/command/build_ext.py", line 1 92, in run self.build_extensions () TypeError: not enough arguments; expected 2, got 1

Arghh! Sorry about that: sloppy and inexcusable. Somebody slap me with a wet noodle. Fixed in CVS now.

Not to be picky, but I'd certainly appreciate better regression testing on distutils, so these trival errors don't occur.

That's a completely fair complaint, and one that I hope to start addressing Real Soon Now with a proper test suite. However, right now I'm smack dab in the middle of adding the "bdist" command with the ability to create a "dumb" binary distribution -- a tarball or zip file that you unpack in $prefix or $exec_prefix to "install" a module distribution. (This is a stepping stone on the way to creating a "smart" binary distribution, like an RPM or Wise installed for Windows.)

Adding support for this has meant revisiting a lot of stable code, and taking advantage of the revisiting to refactor, rethink, and otherwise raise hell. Long term, this is a good thing, but in the short term, the lack of a test suite makes it a wee bit dangerous -- eg. I risk causing stupid breakage in the CVS tree that brave adventurers like you might stumble upon.

This *particular* bit of breakage was *really* stupid, and there's no need for a test suite to catch it: I should have just gone and done a quick build of NumPy or PIL to make sure it was still working. I didn't, and I feel (and look) stupid. Sorry again.

However, when you follow the CVS tree day-to-day, you've got to expect some breakage. I *really* appreciate the fact that you and a few other folks *are* following the CVS day-to-day, and I apologize for wasting your time with trivial breakage like this. I'll try to only check in real serious breakage in the future, to give you guys something to sink your teeth into. >grin<

Would you consider tagging CVS revisions for additional sub-releases, like Distutils_0_1_3a, so we'd know what it likely to be stable? As it is, I think I'll have to save a working copy of distutils, before I update from CVS.

Hmmm... that's an idea. I think I prefer the dated snapshot approach, though. I got lazy there because a number of people told me it wasn't really necessary, but I think it might be after all. A dated snapshot just says, "Here, the code was fairly stable and seemed to be working when I made this" -- which I think is what you want. I have explicitly *not* tagged the tree when making a snapshot, and I have deleted old snapshots -- that's to remind myself (and anyone else who cares) that these are *not* releases.

So I probably *should* have made a snapshot before I started breaking things to support the "bdist" command -- too late now, unless I indulge in some CVS-sponsored time travel. I *will* make a snapshot when the create-a-dumb-binary-distribution stuff is working. It's entirely possible that that snapshot will be the same as what's included in the snapshot Guido will create soon (tomorrow?) called "Python 1.6 alpha1". ;-)

Greg