[Distutils] backwards compatibility of distutils?

[Moore, Paul]

From: Andrew Kuchling [mailto:akuchlin@mems-exchange.org]
> On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 04:22:25PM +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>
> >If you're starting to go for Python 2.2 in distutils, then it'll
> >become very hard for code publishers to provide Python 2.0/2.1
> >versions of their code and, yes, these version are still in use out
> >there.
>
> I don't follow this. Publishers write a setup.py against the
> Distutils API; this has to run on the Python version being used. In
> implementing the API, the Distutils code can use 2.2 or not, but
> that's irrelevant to publishers as long as the installed version of
> Distutils actually runs.

I think the issue is that the "distutils API" isn't entirely well-
defined. My usage of the distutils API is entirely trivial, and I
don't expect I'd have any problem with the version packaged with
Python x.y using features in Python x.y. I'd just use the appropriate
Python/distutils versions and run python setup.py bdist_wininst N
times. Done.

But people writing fancy setup.py code subclass Distutils classes,
use "internal" utility modules (the fancy_getopt module comes to
mind here), and who knows what else. These people (MAL is definitely
one of them) have to worry a lot about setup.py compatibility with
different distutils versions.

This message would be more useful if I knew what the solution to the
problem was :-) [I have a suspicion that it's "document the official
API, and use the time machine", but I don't have the keys to the time
machine...]

Paul.