[Distutils] Supporting extensibility in disutils

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:39 PM 8/2/04 -0400, 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.

FYI, this can be done right now with something like:

   import distutils.command
   import mycommandpackage

   distutils.command.__path__.extend(mycommandpackage.__path__)

although that's admittedly kludgy.  But it's kludgy in a 
backwards-compatible way.  :)