[Distutils] Distutils roadmap of refactoring for 2.7

[Tarek Ziadé]

Hello,

I've started to refactor a few things in Distutils for 2.7, as I
planned to do before the first 2.7 beta.

Here are the major ones FYI:

1- the "sysconfig" module is going to the stdlib, and changes a bit.
Almost all APIs are still present,
    and the ones that were removed are left in distutils.sysconfig and
marked as deprecated. (because they can
    be changed by calls to other APIs)

   IOW, all you have to do at this point for APIs that where moved is
to do "from sysconfig import xx"
   instead of "from distutils.sysconfig import xx"

2-   My next step is to document this new stdlib module in
docs.python.org and to add 2.7 support in Distribute so people can
work with
     2.7 if the want/need.

3 - dir_util, archive_util and file_util are going to be removed in
favor of calls to shutil.
    shutil is going to host two new functions: make_archive and
unpack_archive (the latter was introduced by setuptools)

4 - a standalone version of distutils, backward compatible with 2.5
and 2.6, that can be installed by itself, through pypi, is coming.
    I have no plan to support 2.4 unless someone strongly wants it.

1 is done already in trunk. and is going to be merged in py3 in a few
days. 2. 3. 4. should be done within the next week.

Regards
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org