[Distutils] Packaging situation + mailing list rules

[Tarek Ziadé]

2010/7/2 David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>:
> 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.

You keep saying that for years, but in the meantime, the code was cleaned.

And it's perfectly manageable. We have 5 GSOC students working on it
right now and they
don't seem to have so much problems in changing/reading the code.

And now, it's being rewritten in distutils2 in a backward incompatible way.
So if you don't like some things in the design, you can say it out loud
and make some constructive proposals if you want.


>> 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.

If you use Ubuntu, they make some choices for you.

For instance Distutils is patched in Ubuntu, and you don't get the
same version that one you would get in a plain Python.  Package are
installed in a specific location etc.

So if you want to have the very same version for all packages in your
Linux, and have it behaving exactly like the initial author of each
package wanted, you should install a low-level distro like Linux From
Scratch, and build the environment you like.

So yes, it's open source: you can install a distro and adopt its
choices, or change it, or miltate to have other choices. Or you can
use another distro.