[Distutils] backwards compatibility of distutils?

[Andrew Kuchling]

On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 05:31:19PM +1000, Anthony Baxter wrote:
>When is it ok to lose the backward-compatibility of distutils? 
>Going through the code, there's at least two entire modules (log 
>and fancy_getopt) that should be removed in favour of the 
>new logging and optparse modules. Obviously this isn't possible 
>if 1.5.2 compatibility is to be kept.

The unknown question is if anyone has written setup.py files that
depend on fancy_getopt or distutils.log.  It seems unlikely, but I
don't know for sure, and breaking people's setup.py files is bad.
This also makes me paranoid about rearranging command classes
significantly.  

Perhaps if the PyPI catalog gets very complete, it can be used to take
a survey of setup.py and find out how often people do something
fancier than just calling setup().

>Or should they be replaced with copies of the logging and optparse
>modules in the distutils CVS tree?

Quite likely; the copies would only need to be in the CVS tree for the
standalone Distutils distribution.

--amk                                                    (www.amk.ca)
<reading label> "The solution." Oh, my little friend, if only you were...
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