[Distutils] Distutils roadmap of refactoring for 2.7

exarkun at twistedmatrix.com exarkun at twistedmatrix.com
Sat Jan 23 20:49:47 CET 2010


On 06:41 pm, ziade.tarek at gmail.com wrote:
>On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 7:11 PM, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> 
>wrote:
>>>I'll use the same strategy than sysconfig :
>>>
>>>- if the API is just moved to another place and works exactly the 
>>>same way
>>> (e.g. like what's planned for make_archive), it will  be dropped, 
>>>and the
>>> documentation will refer to the new place.
>>
>>Is this the standard procedure for relocation of stdlib APIs across 
>>2.x
>>releases?
>>I was under the impression that the standard is to do such things 
>>across two
>>release cycles with a deprecation.
>
>I was under the same impression at first (that's how I did at first
>for distutils.sysconfig in my branch) but then MAL suggested in
>python-dev that I could simply update the documentation for these
>APIs, so I've followed that strategy.
>
>Unlike micro releases, I don't think Distutils in 2.7 has to strictly
>behave like in 2.6, API-wise, especially since a standalone backport
>will be released for 2.6. Notice that other changes are coming up once
>the series of PEP we worked on are accepted (which should be before
>Pycon - at least for 345 and 386)

There really is no standard for this.  The few times it's been raised on 
python-dev to create one, discussion has puttered out rather quickly 
with no resolution.

I think that if the people doing this work (so, largely Tarek at this 
point) want, though, they can decide on a specific policy for distutils. 
If so, this should be documented somewhere as well, so that people know 
what to expect when upgrading distutils somehow (either via a stand- 
alone package or with a new version of Python).

Jean-Paul


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