[Distutils] Alternate static metadata PEP submission...

[David Lyon]

On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:30:21 +0100, Floris Bruynooghe
<floris.bruynooghe at gmail.com> wrote:

> This seems to propose a whole build system, while PEP390 only aims for
> static metadata.  

It's not a whole new build system, but potentially a whole new install
system.

There's a big difference.

However, the whole new install system is likely to be contained within
the boilerplate setup.py, where those facilities don't already exist
within distutils now.

For the developer, that's really easy..

Just take a copy of the boilerplate setup.py...

> Not restricting it to static metadata makes the
> domain a lot wider and complicated as shown by countless previous
> discussions on this list (several of these things have been outlined
> before).  

Yes, it is much further reaching and broader.

It's actually less complicated than you might think.

What I'm proposing is less complicated than say.... setuptools..

> Since the problem domain is so huge it will take a very long
> time to come up with a stable version that addresses all issues
> adequately, 

Define long time.. I believe only a few months..

> something which this PEP sidesteps solving the problem it
> targets in a sensible and contained way.

I disagree.

I believe that it's a small programming project amounting to no more
than a few thousand lines of code.

To me, the email correspondence and mailing list activity will be
more voluminous.

> It certainly is a laudable goal to come up with such a build system
> but I don't think it can be seen as *instead of* the metatdata PEP.
> IMHO such a system should be using the static metadata from whatever
> PEP 390 will become.

The metadata is the build/install system.

How metadata is specified in setup.py now is dated. It's hard to
understand for developers and hard to cajole into something that
works well on all platforms.

My proposal is actually about taking the shortest and easiest route
to cleaning up python package/application installation issues.

The end result is a setup.py --install and a setup.info file.

That doesn't seem so overly complicated to me.

David