[Distutils] Distutils integration

[Greg Ward]

On 27 November 1999, T-Mithy Myddletin said:
> I don't know if this is motivation or not, but Vaults of Parnassus is
> ready (and even eagre) to attempt some sort of integration with
> Distutils distributions whenever Distutils is ready to be adopted.

Cool... BUT I worry that having multiple Python archives or
meta-archives might be as bad as having none at all.  Oh well, that's
the mess the Perl world was in five years ago before Jarkko Hietaniemi
came along and cooked up CPAN.

> I have looked briefly at the distutils package. Pretty complicated
> stuff. I understand it is intended to be simplified some eventually,
> when the lower level stuff is sorted out.

I think this is probably a documentation problem.  Yes, the code is
fairly complex, but that's because I wanted it to be fairly easy for
developers and distributors to use, utterly dead simple for installers
to use, and still be extensible.  (Plus I have a dangerous tendency
towards complex designs... oh well.)  Currently, the "documentation" --
that big ugly USAGE file -- is almost as complex as the code, because it
was a two-night braindump that I spewed before releasing Distutils 0.1.

> I hope so. All the
> complicated stuff is good, but you have to have a REALLY SIMPLE option
> for people like me with only simple needs to understand too. (-:
> 
> Anyhow, keep plugging away!

Sounds like I should start plugging away on the nice documentation that
I've been meaning to write for a while.  Ummm, bugs first though.

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                    gward@cnri.reston.va.us
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