[Distutils] Annoucing distribute project

[Jeff Rush]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 10:54 PM 9/24/2008 +0200, Christophe Combelles wrote:
>> there are a LOT of other improvements that are already wanted, such as 
>> support for other (d)vcs,
> 
> Note, by the way, that the reason most of the items listed as "feature" 
> or "wish" on the tracker are in those statuses are because nobody has 
> proposed a design for critique.  Usually, it's just wishes for magic 
> ponies (e.g. uninstall, post-install hooks, etc.) without any discussion 
> of how to deal with the edge cases, interactions, or other negative 
> consequences of said features.  (magic pony manure?)
> 
>>  I sincerely hope that things will speed-up with this fork.
> 
> I imagine they might speed up, but likely at the cost of stability.  If 
> anybody knew enough to be able to add these features in a safe way, then 
> they knew enough to be able to contribute patches to setuptools (after 
> first proposing how they would handle all the nasty edge cases).

I agree, in that we must not add features without careful thought as to their 
impact and cross-platform support.  Python is a conservative community and 
we've seen value in the role of an gatekeeper who sees the bigger picture, as 
  Guido and others for other projects.  Of course, a gatekeeper who is 
too-strict isn't good either - there must be balance.

But to the distribute project, because of the nature of standardizing package 
technology, running this is a huge responsibility.  Please do not start adding 
all features asked for without considering their tradeoffs.  One issue with 
something like setuptools is that packaging APIs get immortalized in setup.py 
files that are not easy to go back and change, so the APIs must carry heavy 
backward compatibility baggage.  You may want to consider using PEPs as a 
basis for discussing change requests.  They're not just for the core Python 
language.

-Jeff