[Distutils] People want CPAN :-) / New Build system

[David Lyon]

Hi David,

I have to agree with you on every point.

On Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:49:12 +0900, David Cournapeau
<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:

> Contrary to other people, I don't think a successor to distutils is that
> hard to develop, especially since good designs in other languages
> already exist. It would take time, especially to get a transition story
> right, but I think it would be worthwhile.

That's just so controversial..

But since Guido has asked, lets just have some good old fashioned pragmatic
software engineering discussion.

Let's toss it around as pure numbers (for what you are suggesting):

 - how many lines of code would it take ?

   (500, 5000, 10000, 20000) ?

 - how much of the existing library could be used ?

   (10%, 25%, 50%,75%, 90%) ?

 - how many months would it take ?

   (3,6,9,12,18,36,72) ?

 - how many people would it require ?

   (1,2,3,5,10) ?

 - Could a PEP be started ? or co-author with somebody
   else ? Are there existing PEPs? Would a PEP for this
   have any chance of success? Could Tarek help with a
   PEP ? He must have some ideas on this..

 - What's the risk ?

I'd suggest we not call it a distutils replacement system.

Lets call it a stripped down simplified package builder.

To me, it's either the existing code from distutils that 
builds what we call a source package. Or it's a new
piece of code that builds a 'standard' python package.

The end result needs to be oriented to a non-technical
audience - so we need to keep it pretty simple - not
too many options.

>From my current understanding, the keys files in any
python package seem to be sources.txt and PKG_INFO.

So it could be possible, imo, to prompt for metadata
on the console, write it to a PKG_INFO, scan for
files and write the sources.txt, and then archive
the whole lot up using the standard library.

That's ultra simplistic... perphaps too much
so.

But imo it's worth doing estimations on.

David