On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 11:05:43 +0200 Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan@ochtman.nl> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Tarek Ziadé <tarek@ziade.org> wrote:
So I prefer to hold it and have a solid implementation in the stldib. The only thing I am asking is to retain ourselves to do *anything* in distutils and continue to declare it frozen, because I know it will be tempting to do stuff there...
That policy has been a bit annoying. Gentoo has been carrying patches forever to improve compilation with C++ stuff (mostly about correctly passing on environment variables), and forward-porting them on every release gets tedious, but the packaging/distutils2 effort has made it harder to get them included in plain distutils. I understand there shouldn't be crazy patching in distutils, but allowing it to inch forward a little would make the lives of the Gentoo Python team easier, at least.
I think the whole idea that distutils should be frozen and improvements should only go in distutils2 has been misled. Had distutils been improved instead, many of those enhancements would already have been available in 3.2 (and others would soon be released in 3.3). Deciding to remove packaging from 3.3 is another instance of the same mistake, IMO. Regards Antoine.