[Distutils] thoughts on distutils 1 & 2 (addendum)

[Stefan Seefeld]

has wrote:

> Oops, forgot to mention an obvious benefit for DU developers: 
> eliminating a not insignificant quantity of code from DU.

What code would that be ? In the simplest case setup.py is quite trivial.
It's only when things get more complex and require 'manual' fine-tuning
that this script (or other user-specific modules it loads) becomes large.
I honestly find this approach quite scalable.

> In particular, 
> all module metadata handling (parsing/generating/verifying) duties can 
> be handled by a much more useful general-purpose modulemetadata module 
> in the standard library, to which DU would become just another client.

what is the scope of such a 'module metadata' module ? And who would
use it beside distutils ?

As I said earlier, I don't believe anything beside the already existing
metadata (available through pythonic introspection) is needed or even
useful for modules in general. What you seem to have in mind is important
for *packages*, and that's exactly distutils' scope.

Whenever I hear 'general purpose' a little warning light flashes in my mind... :-)

Regards,
		Stefan