On 24 June 2000, Greg Stein said:
Would the "shlex" module be helpful here? It is in the standard library and is (well?) maintained by ESR. It could help reduce the code inside distutils.
I looked at "shlex", but didn't like the fact that it 1) does character-by-character analysis of input, and 2) requires a file-like object. Just a performance concern, really.
[ I've always questioned the need for distutils' own "copy file" functions and whatnot... seems there is a bit of duplication occurring... ]
Two reasons for that: bugs in the standard library versions, and missing features in the standard library versions. I think the first argument goes away now that I've given up on 1.5.1 compatibility (shutil.py was really broken in 1.5.1), but the fact remains that the copy functions in shutil.py don't have a dry_run option, don't have a verbose option, don't have a preserve_times option, don't have a preserve_symlinks option, etc. All of these things are somewhere between useful and necessary. I'm always open for ideas on reducing the amount of code in the Distutils; it really is getting ridiculous. It cracked 10k lines of code+comments+doc this weekend -- about 5300 lines of straight code, I think. Anyways, the basic required functionality is now in place, so I'm open to clever refactoring/reduction/simplification patches. Greg