Martin v. Löwis wrote:
If distutils is now abandoned and replaced with something else, the same story will happen again: the developers will run away, the package gets abandoned,
Seems to me that if we had something with a clean design that was easy to understand, maintain and extend, that this wouldn't be so much of a problem. If the original author ran away, others would more easily be able to take over the task.
We have to stop this. If distutils has flaws, fix them. Never ever even think about rewriting software:
Usually this is good advice, but it is possible for something to be so badly broken that the only reasonable way to fix it is to throw it away and start over. I'm not sure whether distutils is really that badly broken. But an earlier poster seemed to be saying that he had great difficulty finding anything that could be changed without breaking something that someone relied on. It's hard to fix something if you can't change it at all. I'd be happy to discuss ways of evolving distutils into something better, but first we have to decide that it is actually permissible to change it and possibly break stuff that's relying on its internals. -- Greg