[Distutils] Distutils roadmap : big picture..

[David Lyon]

Hi All,

I must admit that my perspective of distutils is from a system
administrators perspective. Not a package developer.

Maybe I write code sometimes that I want to ship out.. like a
package mangager.. haha.. anyway..

My general comments for distutils are:

 - introduce gui tools to help developers "build"

 - introduce gui tools to help users "manage"

 - improve support of distutils on the windows platform
   so that it looks like it was developed after the
   game space invaders and not before.

 - talk to other "stars" in the python universe ie py2exe
   wxpython, pip.. installers.. ie NSIS etc etc..

 - improve package consistency

 - write more tests

After spending a few months on this list I now recognise
that many people have dedicated an enormous amount of time
effort, skill and commitment.

In summary I'm suggesting that we breath some new life
into distutils...


David

ps: my pet hate is windows installers for packages. I want
these to go away. I don't like running executables to install
a package.