[Distutils] The problem with Setuptools on Python 3.

[Lennart Regebro]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 16:36, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> I agree that in the short term, distutils should be improved, but in the
> long term, I don't see anything which would be both a significant
> improvement while staying backward compatible with distutils, if only
> because so many setup.py files depend on implementation details of
> distutils.

I think the answer to this can be only one: Since this is open source,
you can't expect somebody to do it. It will only be done if you do it
yourself, "you" being the people who experience the pain, in this
case, well, you. :-D

I sure as heck do not have the knowledge to do it. So the answer I
think, is the cold and brutal "Yes! Great Idea! When are you done?"
:-)


What I'm worried about with distutils is both what you mention:
Missing flexibility internally, and also that the plans are to make it
*smaller*, which inevitably will break backwards compatibility, which
will cause pains. And I still haven't gotten any answer on how to make
a backport of a new distutils and have that automatically installed
when you install a package that uses the new features. (Although maybe
just failing with an error asking you to install distutils vX.Y might
be acceptable).

It's quite possible that it's better to make something that at least
has another name, which totally avoids all the above problems. That
doesn't mean the code has to be all new and shiny. So I sure wouldn't
mind something new, that avoids the distutil problems. But wanting it
is something else than doing it. I can't. Can you? And it would be
needed rather quickly too. :-D

At least somebody could maybe make some sort of rough plan of what
this golden distutils should contain and how it should work, and we
can get a feeling if it's even remotely feasible.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
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