Hi,
Aha, someone proposed the idea :-) I know that Debian removed
distutils from Python stdlib (it is a separate package) for a long
time.
You may mention https://github.com/pypa/distutils/ somewhere in the
PEP: "Python Module Distribution Utilities extracted from the Python
Standard Library". I don't know the future of this project since
setuptools now also contains distutils. I would be nice to hear about
setuptools maintainers here.
setuptools 50.0.0 release didn't go well: it broke many use cases on
Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, etc. See:
https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues especially
https://github.com/pypa/setuptools/issues/2350 For example, Fedora
does patch the stdlib distutils with a downstream-only patch, so pip
installs into /usr/local rather than /usr. Well, there is likely a way
to fix this issue in setuptools, but right now the situation is
complicated.
Le ven. 4 sept. 2020 à 13:37, Steve Dower
The final dependency on distutils is CPython itself, which uses it to build the native extension modules in the standard library (except on Windows). Because this is a CPython build-time dependency, it is possible to continue to use distutils for this specific case without it being part of the standard library. (...) After Python 3.12 is started and when the CPython build process no longer depends on distutils being in the standard library, the entire Lib/distutils directory and Lib/test/test_distutils.py file will be removed from the repository.
In practical terms, how Python 3.12 will build its extensions if it doesn't contain distutils anymore? Should we vendor a copy of setuptools, just for Python setup.py? So far, Python has no external dependency to be built. It makes it easy to build on various platforms. I would prefer to not have to download something from the Internet to build Python after I downloaded a Python tarball. We already have wheel packages of setuptools and pip in Lib/ensurepip/_bundled/. Victor