[Distutils] Supporting extensibility in disutils

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:
> I'd like it to be possible to add additional commands to distutils with 
> modifying distutils itself or the setup.py file included with packages.  I 
> don't think this needs to be a particularly risky change.
> 
> The use case is to allow additional commands to be added for all distutils 
> setup.py scripts, or to replace commands with site-specific.  This could then 
> be used to support alternate bdist_* flavors (either for additional types of 
> packages or alternate implementations for currently supported package types).  
> It could also be used to provide alternate implementations of existing 
> commands to support alternate policies.
> 
> Specifically, I propose that distutils should be extended to search for an 
> implementation class across a list of packages instead of only 
> distutils.command, keeping distutils.command as the default entry in the 
> list.  Additional packages could be identified using a command line option or 
> configuration data.
> 
> I'm willing to work up a patch for this; are there any objections to adding 
> this functionality in Python 2.4?  (I'd like to have this in the coming alpha 
> if at all possible.)

I'm +1 on being able to *add* new commands this way, but a
strong -1 on overriding distutils own commands by doing
import hackery. The reason for the latter is that tracking down
errors in such setups is a complete nightmare - both for the
developer and the user.

How about something like a PYTHONDISTUTILSPATH + distutils.path
(mimicing PYTHONPATH and sys.path for command lookups) ?

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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