On Mon, 15 Apr 2019 at 22:35, Stefano Borini <stefano.borini@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
I am on a PEP scouting effort to check the current status of python packaging and its historical context, mostly for learning purposes. I noted that the PEP defines some functions for pkgutil (e.g. get_distributions), but I cannot find them. I tried to do some searching on the mailing list history, but I came up with pretty much nothing of value. It appears that the topic was last considered in 2009 (the year of the PEP). dist-info was then implemented, but I cannot find any information about the missing API, nor any additional PEP, except for a brief reference in PEP-427.
Does anyone have some context for this?
I understand it was 10 years ago, so it's mostly a curiosity. Thanks.
From what I recall (I was around at the time) a lot of the discussion was on distutils-sig - did you check the archives of that list in your searching? But there was a lot of what I would describe as "heated debate" going on at that point, so it may be hard to find anything
PEP 376 was part of a rather grand plan to re-engineer a lot of Python's packaging tools (distutils and setuptools at the time, mainly). Although the PEP was accepted, a lot of the coding never got done and ultimately the project was abandoned, and we moved over to a more incremental approach of improving what was there, rather than wholesale replacing things. So the PEP itself is something of a mixture now, some parts that are implemented, some parts that are relevant in principle but the details never got filled in, and some parts that simply never happened. particularly informative. Hopefully, that's of some use - good luck in your investigations! Paul