On Fri, Sep 04, 2020 at 01:10:37PM -0400, Paul Ganssle wrote:
On 9/4/20 12:45 PM, Stefan Krah wrote:
Since distutils does not change, why remove it? It is a lot of work for people with little gain.
If we don't remove it, we should at least freeze the bug component so that people cannot report bugs in distutils. Triaging these bugs alone is a decent amount of work. We should probably also set up a Bedevere to auto-reject PRs that touch distutils files (since telling people that distutils is frozen and no longer maintained is effort as well), and disable distutils in the CI so that it does not generate work for people maintaining the buildbots.
That is fine, but also note that Victor reported a CI issue introduced by the external setuptools package.
I'd really like to build C extensions without downloading an external package.
How often do you actually build extensions without building or installing external packages?
All the time, especially when I'm writing them. I imagine that there's a huge amount of internal company code that discourages use of pip installed packages as well. Or has an air-gapped network in the first place.
Features like C++ support have not been worked on for more than a decade. Are the setuptools maintainers planning to address these issues now?
Considering that we /aren't/ adding anything to distutils today, the chances of this happening in setuptools are pretty much strictly better than in distutils.
Given the time constraints that everyone (rightfully!) has, I'd say the chances are rather low. My point was that features should not be a reason for deprecating distutils. Stefan Krah