[Distutils] Moving distutils minimum required version to 2.3

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:52 PM 6/22/2005 +1000, Anthony Baxter wrote:
>As an example: distutils' current option parsing code (fancy_getopt)
>behaves quite differently to both optparse and getopt. I don't see
>how this could be considered a good thing.

Well, if it changes how command classes have to express their metadata, it 
might be a bad thing to replace it.


> > I'd suggest to have distutils use the new tools from Python
> > 2.3 if available, but still continue to ship its own versions
> > for Python versions prior to 2.3.
>
>And suddenly the distutils code is even _more_ complex than it
>is now! Making it use _either_ distutils.log or logging does
>not make the code cleaner, or easier to work with.

I thought the plan was simply to make distutils.log use logging "under the 
hood".  If that's the case, then none of the logging client code should 
change.  So if somebody wants to use the old version of distutils.log, 
that's not a backward compatibility problem.

What I worry about is that there are lots of packages out there that do 
crazy hacks to the distutils in order to accomplish things, and these hacks 
often rely on obscure properties of the current implementation.  So, making 
it easier to work on (i.e. change) the distutils code base might actually 
be counterproductive.  :)