[Distutils] Distutils at the PyCon 2004 sprints

[Fred L. Drake, Jr.]

I've not heard anything about either of the proposed Distutils sprints for 
next week.  Just as a reminder, these are:

- general distutils improvements and wart smashing
  (http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/DistUtils20)

  This is generally about avoiding some of the current warts rather than
  dealing with major new functionality, with the exception of the PEP 262
  (http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0262.html) installation database.

  It's hard to get a good sense of what people's priorities are from the
  wiki page, but it would certainly be good to knock out some of the more
  long-standing warts.

- dependency support
  (http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/DistutilsDependencies)

  This is Phillip Eby's proposal for adding dependency support to
  distutils, including automatic download and installation of required
  packages.

  I don't know what other people's reaction is to his proposal; aspects
  of it are certainly interesting and mesh well with the PEP 262
  installation database.

I'd really like to see some improvements happening in either of these areas.  
I don't know what it takes to get these sprints to go from proposed to 
concrete, or if we can just take space by squatting (unlikely to be well 
received ;).

Who else will be at the sprints and willing to spend a day or two on 
distutils?  In case there aren't enough outstanding distutils tasks, I'll be 
glad to propose a few more that I'm going to need to deal with anyway.  ;-)


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.  <fdrake at acm.org>
PythonLabs at Zope Corporation