[Distutils] Request for Input re Packaging

[Jeff Rush]

In researching the state of packaging, I've been reading the archives and all 
the bug reports filed against distutils.

I'd like though to get some examples of particularly troublesome uses of 
setup.py, to pull together and propose some changes to make their use case a 
bit easier.  So far such cases I've been made aware of are Twisted, numpy and 
SciPy.  If you know of a tough case where the developer had to jump through 
hoops to make it work, please point me to it.

I'd also like to get suggestions of improvements to PyPI, which I've not seen 
much discussion about.  A few I've collected are:

   - move to https/ssl

   - improvements re package signing

   - internal parsing/aggregation of metadata for better queries,
     and to stop using the filename for version/platform/etc. information.

   - moving of requirements logic from client into PyPI, where it
     has db access to the dependency, resolves what packages are
     needed and delivers a list back to the client for prompting
     the user for permission, similar to how "yum" interacts today.

   - a db lint-picking walker that looks for problems on PyPI, such
     as binary distros w/o a source distro, lack of binaries for
     those platforms often without compilers, failure to provide a
     link to a version repo for use with "project==dev".

   - some auto-generated reports of access statistics and the mix
     of distutils vs setuptools, those who "registered" w/o
     "uploading", and perhaps if we get a new classifier assigned,
     some idea of Python 2.x vs 3.x packages.

Last, some of the issues with distutils/setuptools can be solved with 
zc.buildout.  If you have found zc.buildout lacking, please tell me where it 
fell short so we can see if anything can be done.

Thanks for your involvement,

-Jeff