[Distutils] Packaging situation + mailing list rules

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 2:13 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
[..]
>> This is precisely where I don't understand.
>
> Here is my understanding of what happened: as we   (we being at least
> a couple of major maintainers in the numpy community) understood it 6
> months ago in the "we want CPAN" thread started by Guido, the idea was
> to gradually evolve from the existing code to whatever distutils2 aims
> up to be. Because several attempts have been made to do so by
> proeminent numpy developers in the last decade, we have the
> *experience* that this could not work, at least for us.

All these attempts were doomed to fail, because of the backward
compatibility issues.
I was hit by that too. But this barrier is gone, because we are
working on a new namespace. Which means that we can build whatever we
want now in distutils2.

And the build process is the part that can be entirely redone. But you
didn't answer on that. This was your main critic against distutils.
ISTM that this is precisely what we could improve wrt the usage of
distutils in sci

>
> Certainly, there was a failure from us to communicate what's wrong
> with current distutils design, but the situation is still the same
> today: absolutely none of the thing that distribute2 is working on is
> an improvement for us. None of the recent PEP addresses any
> significant issue for us. We don't care about pypi as is, we don't
> care about complex requirement/versioning, we don't care about
> uninstall, etc... We simply do not agree in any significant way on the
> distutils issues. If you look at bento goals, they do not even attempt
> to solve any issue raised in the recent PEP.

This is not entirely true, as far as I understand your work. For example,
we are currently removing setup.py in favor of 100% static definitions
using setup.cfg,
thanks to PEP 345 / 390. (Bento seems to have similar static files now)

Overall, I am curious to know what are your issues, if it not about
the building process and the definition of metadata.

>
> And again, I am not saying this to criticize your work (or anyone's
> else). Surely, I cannot complain that you or someone's else is not
> working on my issues. But I think it is a good reason to go on our
> separate ways to implement a solution, at least for now.

I know you want to work on your side, and I am not criticizing that.

I am just very skeptical that your issues are so different from the issues
we are working in distutils2.