[Distutils] The problem with Setuptools on Python 3.

[David Lyon]

>> Please Greg, add your use case here with David's one, at the end of the
> page,
>> since we are trying to work on a solution.
>>
>> http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/ManifestPluginSystem/Draft

I can identify three major areas of concern:

 1) Platform testing/builds (via cloud computing)
 2) External build tools
 3) too many versions of python

One thing you guys should also consider is automated building/testing
of packages. On different platforms.

Let me give you a practical example...

package win32...

latest version.. no longer works on windows 2000...

only works on xp... or vista...

Bad for me.. takes me time to figure out whats wrong...

Only solution.. go back and find an older release.. yes.. i know..
I can do that... that works...

With cloud computing... you can get test environments for every platform

Amazon web services as one example offer this 

Perl does nightly "builds" and tests....

their automated test system "tests everything"

Another big issue i dislike with many packages... they depend on
having msvc installed to be able to build them.

In many cases because I don't have MSC installed... this prevents
me from building some packages. I don't like that...

I don't believe building "everything" on the 5-10 major platforms
we have (or however many there are) is too much.

Plus now, we have all these different versions of python.. and
instead of getting better it is only seeming to get more worse...

David