Wording about packaging in the 3.3 announcement
Hi Georg,
I would like to clarify something in order to remove a misleading or confusing statement from the release email:
- The new "packaging" module, building upon the "distribute" and "distutils2" projects and deprecating "distutils"
First, packaging *is* distutils2, modulo a few changesets that I have to port between the codebases. Second, I would remove the mention of distribute: packaging is an implementation of the packaging PEPs which have their origins in setuptools and which have been improved by the community, and it also takes some minor features and ideas from setuptools, but I think that “building upon” is too strong (and mentioning only distribute may hurt the feelings of setuptools authors and users—distutils-sig is a heated place).
My suggestion:
- The new "packaging" module (also known as distutils2, and released standalone under this name), implementing the new packaging formats and deprecating "distutils".
The whatsnew document has the same problem, and also mixes packaging (venv and packaging) with imports (namespace packages), but I did not get a chance to fix it before today, so I probably will after the alpha.
Thanks
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 12:20 AM, Éric Araujo <merwok@netwok.org> wrote:
The whatsnew document has the same problem, and also mixes packaging (venv and packaging) with imports (namespace packages), but I did not get a chance to fix it before today, so I probably will after the alpha.
Those additions were from me, and were a result of the fact that those are *big* changes that should have a huge positive impact for end users in the long run, but weren't being advertised in the What's New at all. (packaging was at least mentioned in the "new modules" section, but replacing the framework for component distribution deserves a lot more prominence than that - it's far more significant for the future of Python than minor syntactic changes like PEP 380 or 409).
The reason they're lumped together like that is because they're all related to code distribution - namespace packages are about being able to easily split up a single Python package across multiple installed components, PEP 405 is about maintaining multiple independent sets of installed components on a single machine, and packaging/pysetup is the new system for building and installing components in general.
While it makes sense that Raymond doesn't want to devote too much time to cleaning up What's New until the feature set stabilises in the first beta, we need to remember that alpha users also need some pointers to the shiny new toys we'd like them to tinker with. pysetup and pyvenv in particular are rather hard to test in an automated fashion, so we'd really like people hammering on them manually. In the absence of preliminary entries on those topics, I added the shorthand section so that they were at least mentioned and users would know to go look at them and try them out. Ideally, each of those bullet points will be expanded out to an entire section in their own right.
Cheers, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia
participants (2)
-
Nick Coghlan -
Éric Araujo