[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[Lennart Regebro]

On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 17:46, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:
> That was not exactly the conclusion of the summit. The idea is to make
> distutils
> a light, reference library, on wich third party libraries could implements
> OS-dependant features and so on. So part of the plan is to remove bdist_*, etc..

Well, I wasn't involved in the final discussions, as I had to leave,
but one of the problems mentioned with this is that distribution
becomes a problem, as 2.4 already has a module called distutils, so
there is no obvious way to know that you need to install a new version
of it. Unless there is some magic hack for this which is guaranteed to
always work (ha!) I would side with those who said it would be better
if this distutils version is called something else than distutils.

But if you can promise me that a package that needs a newer version of
distutils will at a minimum exit with an error saying exactly how to
upgrade it I will remove this objection.  :)

Also, renaming means you don't have to be backwards compatible. In
particular, we don't have to make sure setuptools still works.

So I would say both you and Philip are correct. Distutils should be
refactored. And replaced. :)

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Pythonista, Barista, Notsotrista.
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
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