From: Andrew Kuchling [mailto:akuchlin@mems-exchange.org]

On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 04:22:25PM +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

...

If you're starting to go for Python 2.2 in distutils, then it'll become very hard for code publishers to provide Python 2.0/2.1 versions of their code and, yes, these version are still in use out there.

I don't follow this. Publishers write a setup.py against the Distutils API; this has to run on the Python version being used. In implementing the API, the Distutils code can use 2.2 or not, but that's irrelevant to publishers as long as the installed version of Distutils actually runs.

I think the issue is that the "distutils API" isn't entirely well- defined. My usage of the distutils API is entirely trivial, and I don't expect I'd have any problem with the version packaged with Python x.y using features in Python x.y. I'd just use the appropriate Python/distutils versions and run python setup.py bdist_wininst N times. Done. But people writing fancy setup.py code subclass Distutils classes, use "internal" utility modules (the fancy_getopt module comes to mind here), and who knows what else. These people (MAL is definitely one of them) have to worry a lot about setup.py compatibility with different distutils versions. This message would be more useful if I knew what the solution to the problem was :-) [I have a suspicion that it's "document the official API, and use the time machine", but I don't have the keys to the time machine...] Paul.