At 02:20 PM 9/23/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

If you take the time to read everything you'll see that there were no real alternative design proposed,

You did not respond to repeated requests (from more than one person), for clarification regarding the requirements that your proposal was trying to fill. More than one person expressed reservations about the complexity of your candidate proposal, and wanted to know why we needed a fully conditional syntax, if the only use case for conditionals was expressing dependencies. That there was not a "complete" alternative proposal is true... but that's only because you would not answer the question that several people asked: that is, why do we *need* conditionals, for anything besides dependencies? What are the use cases? More than one person asked that question, but I never saw you answer it. (In one case, you answered with the use cases for what the conditionals needed to be able to *check*, but not *what the conditionals were conditioning* -- which was the whole point of the question.) A lack of polished alternatives to your proposal does not constitute a positive rationale for your own proposal, especially if people are asking for the rationale in order to determine whether a simpler proposal would suffice! I dropped my previous competing proposal some time ago when you presented strong use cases for static metadata. And I'd have happily dropped my support for Sridhar's proposal, too, if you'd given similarly strong use cases for the proposal you went with. But even if you *didn't* give those use cases, I'd have been fine with you saying to Python-Dev, "I got tired of the discussion and chose to Pronounce." (After all, that is what you more or less said on the distutils-sig.) But what hacked me off is that *here*, you presented your pronouncement as if it were a summary of distutils-sig discussion, when the last flurry of traffic on the distutils-sig right beforehand was a bunch of questions and requests for use cases. Not nice.