On 28 March 2000, Guido van Rossum said:
I'm hoping to release a first, rough alpha of Python 1.6 by April 1st (no joke!).
Not everything needs to be finished by then, but I hope to have the current versions of distutil, expat, and sre in there.
We just need to do a bit of CVS trickery to put Distutils under the Python tree. I'd *like* for Distutils to have its own CVS existence at least until 1.6 is released, but it's not essential. Two of the big Distutils to-do items that I enumerated at IPC8 have been knocked off: the "dist" command has been completely redone (and renamed "sdist", for "source distribution"), as has the "install" command. The really major to-do items left for Distutils are: * implement the "bdist" command with enough marbles to generate RPMs and some sort of Windows installer (Wise?); Solaris packages, Debian packages, and something for the Mac would be nice too. * documentation (started, but only just) And there are some almost-as-important items: * Mac OS support; this has been started, at least for the unfashionable and clunky sounding MPW compiler; CodeWarrior support (via AppleEvents, I think) would be nice * test suite -- at least the fundamental Distutils marbles should get a good exercise; it would also be nice to put together a bunch of toy module distributions and make sure that "build" and "install" on them do the right things... all automatically, of course! * reduce number of tracebacks: right now, certain errors in the setup script or on the command line can result in a traceback, when they should just result in SystemExit with "error in setup script: ..." or "error on command line: ..." * fold in Finn Bock's JPython compat. patch * fold in Michael Muller's "pkginfo" patch * finish and fold in my Python 1.5.1 compat. patch (only necessary as long as Distutils has a life of its own, outside Python) Well, I'd better get cracking ... Guido, we can do the CVS thing any time; I guess I'll mosey on downstairs. Greg -- Greg Ward - software developer gward@cnri.reston.va.us Corporation for National Research Initiatives 1895 Preston White Drive voice: +1-703-620-8990 Reston, Virginia, USA 20191-5434 fax: +1-703-620-0913