[Distutils] Proposal for Distribute 0.7

[ssteinerX@gmail.com]

On Oct 15, 2009, at 3:55 PM, P.J. Eby wrote:

[a whole bunch of stuff...]

Understood and I've observed the public portions of all of this.  Much  
of it has not been pretty.

Personality conflicts aside, I wonder if it would be possible to move  
some portion of the base of both setuptools and Distribute to some  
sort of shared foundation.

That would reduce the amount of duplicate work that I can see coming  
out of this divergence and, perhaps, provide a basis on top of which  
setuptools and Distribute can continue to evolve.

This kind of "shared utility" project could, perhaps, be undertaken by  
someone that the two team leaders both know and trust and could become  
a shared resource instead of having the two teams competing for the  
extremely valuable (and severely limited) pool of people you would  
trust to work on this.

The thing that has bothered me for years is that, while the code  
that's being installed is generally of higher quality in the Python  
world, the tools for doing so in the Ruby world have pulled ahead and  
now do a better job of installing code that's not as good.

Unfortunately, that can give the Ruby solution a visible head start  
that often times can't be overcome in the minds of management,  
regardless of the relative quality of the resultant products.

Thanks,

S