[Distutils] Python people want CPAN and how the latter came about

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> A separate issue with "setup.py upload", though, is that it really wants
> one of two undesirable things:
> 
>  * the upload is done at the same time as the release package is generated
>  * the release package is generated twice
> 
> The former requires that proper credentials are available to whoever is
> creating the release package.  Historically for Twisted, this isn't how
> things have been set up.  We could probably deal with it, but it would
> be nice if it were not a requirement.

It actually isn't. Upload will upload all files that are listed on
distribution.dist_files, which is a three-tuple of (command/filetype,
pyversion, filename). So if you somehow (e.g. with a new command, or
hard-coded) put stuff into dist_files, you could arrange for

python setup.py pickup_files upload

to upload the pre-built files; thereby you can upload files as source
that had not been generated by sdist.

Regards,
Martin