[Distutils] Alternate static metadata PEP submission...

[David Cournapeau]

David Lyon wrote:
>
> What's a few thousand lines of code between friends..

I think that's some quite tough thousand lines, though. You have to know
a lot about the different platforms, and in my experience at least,
designing a good tool and API around this kind of problems is hard.

The good news is that there are existing tools in other environments
which do this in a pretty good way already, so we could steal their idea
and just reimplement the thing for python. This problem space has seen a
lot of new ideas since distutils was implemented ten years ago (and we
can learn from distutils mistakes).

I still like the idea of reusing the same format as .cabal files (see
here:
-http://www.haskell.org/cabal/release/cabal-latest/doc/users-guide/authors.html).
It does everything you want to do with .cfg files, with the advantage of
being proven for real softwares and more complete. The use of ini-like
files with conditional in sections really feels like an ugly and
inflexible hack for a new system, I am not sure I understand why you
want to use them for a brand-new system where backward compatibility
with setup.cfg isn't a concern ?

David