On Tue, 19 Jun 2012 17:46:30 -0400
Éric Araujo
With beta coming, a way to deal with that unfortunate situation needs to be found. We could (a) grant an exception to packaging to allow changes after beta1; (b) keep packaging as it is now under a provisional status, with due warnings that many things are expected to change; (c) remove the unstable parts and deliver a subset that works (proposed by Tarek to the Pyramid author on distutils-sig); (d) not release packaging as part of Python 3.3 (I think that was also suggested on distutils-sig last month).
I don’t think (a) would give us enough time; we really want a few months (and releases) to hash out the API (most notably with the pip and buildout developers) and clean the bdist situation. Likewise (c) would require developer (my) time that is currently in short supply. (b) also requires time and would make development harder, not to mention probable user pain. This leaves (d), after long reflection, as my preferred choice, even though I disliked the idea at first (and I fully expect Tarek to feel the same way).
So if you want to remove packaging from 3.3, it should be before the beta which will be out in a few days. Regards Antoine.