[Distutils] RFC: Updating PEP 345

[Ian Bicking]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 9:40 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Why change the name? A different name isn't going to be better enough to
> be
> > worth the hassle. Deprecation is waaaay overrated as a tool for reducing
> the
> > pain of making people change their code or habits.
>
> I don't think it's a good idea to have a different name in PKG-INFO
> and in the arguments to describe
> the same element. we should have the same name everywhere for
> consistency at the end.
>
> I don't see anything wrong about adding a simple deprecation warning
> here, It won't happen again
> for quite a while.
>

People who install packages freak out over warnings.  If you could do a
warning during a PyPI upload, then someone who can actually make a change
might see it.  People installing a package should not see this warning.  I
feel very strongly about this as a general rule - putting messages intended
for packagers into the output presented during installation is distracting
and disconcerting and useless.

In the "check" command it would be entirely proper to issue a warning.  But
no one is going to re-release a project just to fix the spelling of this
argument in setup.py, and a lot of libraries just don't get updated often,
or people deliberately use old versions to avoid regression.  So outside of
the check command it should not cause any warning.

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20090410/d87205d2/attachment.htm>