[Distutils] Packaging situation + mailing list rules

[David Cournapeau]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 9:09 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik at gmail.com> wrote:
> Great post, Tarek. Following good old newsgroups/FIDOnet tradition it
> could be nice to see this transformed to Rules/FAQ document that will
> be reposted automatically here by a robot about once a month.
>
> Without such documents your proposal will be weakly supported, because
> people will still have questions, and you will need to answer them
> reasonably to eliminate the source of conflict for making
> collaboration moving into the right direction (which you also need to
> define).
>
> 1. Why the rules?
>> From time to time this mailing list is getting very unpleasant to work
>> in because some old disagreements, and because some people are
>> starting to get really nasty.
>
> 2. What are those 'disagreements' people can agree upon?

I think the following in uncontroversial:

distutils and setuptools are useful packaging solutions which have
significant shortcoming, both design and implementation-wise. Some
people believe the distutils/setuptools/distribute issues can be
solved by gradually deprecating code and adding new features, other
people (me, but I am not alone) believe it would be better and faster
to rewrite something from scratch because the distutils code is
unmanageable and too complicated.

> 11. It is said that people may disagree that Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora
> are using Distribute? But why??

Nobody disagrees about the use of distribute. That's open source, and
one of the point of open source is to let people do what they want,
and nobody should be prevented to use distribute because someone does
not like it. But that works both ways - if I do not want to use
distribute, I should not be forced to use it because someone else
decided it was good for me.

David