[Distutils] PEP 386 status - last round here ?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

P.J. Eby wrote:
> At 09:15 PM 11/29/2009 +0100, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>> 2009/11/29 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
>> [..]
>> >
>> > WSGI and setuptools have been widely adopted in spite of their
>> technical and
>> > ideological flaws, because they had good incentive engineering.
>> >
>> > Or, in other words, because practicality beats purity, every single
>> time.
>>
>> Do you mean here that this independently-created standard, this good
>> incentive engeneering a.k.a.
>> Setuptools, is doomed not to evolve anymore ?   e.g. to adapt its
>> standard to a common standard that is going to raise and be added in
>> stldib at some point ?
> 
> I'm saying that ignoring backwards compatibility (as MAL and Ben have
> proposed) is bad incentive engineering.

Ignoring backwards compatibility is a bad thing, IMHO. Breaking
forward compatibility (sometimes) is a good thing, since it allows
evolution to find new better paths of development.

Fact is, you are just misinterpreting what I wrote. You can't expect
setuptools as-of today to work with a standard that is devised to
be implemented by future tools.

What you are referring to is breaking forward compatibility, ie.
you expect today's setuptools to work with future packages that
will be written against a future standard.

New packages relying on the the new version format will, of course,
require and use a package manager that supports the new format.

If setuptools doesn't want to support it, that's fine. I'm sure
Distribute will ... and could even support old setuptools packages
by adding a --use-old-style-setuptools-package-format option ;-) to
Distribute, so I don't see much of a problem with breaking
forward compatibility in this case.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
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