[Distutils] Re: buildpkg.py to evaluate (Was: Python packagemaker for OS X Installer.app)

Jack Jansen jack@oratrix.nl
Sun Nov 18 16:48:01 2001


Recently, "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com> said:
> Jack Jansen wrote:
> > 
> > Recently, "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com> said:
> > > Hmm, I think we have to do something about the development process
> > > for distutils. AFAIK, Andrew is the current distutils champion --
> > > perhaps we ought to be a little more flexible w/r to checkins
> > > and allow more people to review the distutils patches ?!
> > 
> > Yes, definitely. I've also had distutils Mac support miss 2.0 because
> > of this... No critique implied, I fully understand that people have
> > priorities, but I think we should get rid of bottlenecks if at all
> > possible.
> 
> Right -- we should allow for distutils updates *between* Python 
> releases too.

This wouldn't work for the Mac (and probably not for Windows either):
no-one is going to download anything except complete, test-and-tried
MacPython distributions. There are a few thousand people who
download betas and about 2 people developing from CVS, but the
majority of the MacPython users follow distributions.

That is: unless distutils itself could be thaught how to upgrade
itself, and distutils distributions have a "minimal required version"
field. For most Python packages this wouldn't work, but I think for
distutils it could be done. Distutils is pure Python, so there are no
problems with missing compilers, search paths, etc, and on every user
machine we should be able to download a new version (or, in case of
inadequate permissions, tell the user to inform the sysmgr). Also,
distutils on the machine where a distribution is created could act as
the enforcer of the rule that each distutils-based distribution needs
to include the distutils version number under which it is supposed to run.
--
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