[Distutils] Distutils changes - end user requirements (Was: Deprecate MANIFEST.in)

[zooko]

On Apr 8, 2009, at 4:27 AM, Paul Moore wrote:

> 1. (Meta-requirement) I want to be able to download a Windows  
> installer[1] for *every* package I need.
> 1a. This means that the barrier for packagers building Windows  
> installers should be as low as possible.
> 1b. It also means that other formats (e.g. eggs) should offer no  
> benefit over Windows installers

I personally, as a consumer of other people's software, prefer to  
acquire their packages as sdist .tar.gz's or as .eggs on all  
platforms, including Windows, which I use regularly.  So your and my  
preferences as a consumer of packages differ on this.  Fortunately,  
as far as the distutils is concerned "Windows installers" vs.  
"sdists" vs. "eggs" are not mutually exclusive.  The distutils will  
provide a standard for metadata so that all of those distribution  
formats can have the same metadata, and it will allow automation such  
as bdist_msi and sdist_dsc (from stdeb) so that it can become easier  
for developers to produce these things.  By the way, the exact same  
sorts of preference-among-consumers issues arises on the Linux side  
(which I also use regularly), where some people mistakenly think that  
they want distutils to support eggs worse, when what they really want  
is for it to support debs better (which I hope stdeb will ultimately  
do).

Regards,

Zooko