[Distutils] Packaging situation + mailing list rules

[David Cournapeau]

On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com> wrote:

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

Without going into the technical details, it really boils down to
separate the concerns of the different parts of a packaging solution,
and having clear interface between them.

For example, it is *possible* to integrate a new build system within
distutils. I know this for a fact because I have done so (numpy and
scipy can be entirely built with scons instead of distutils for the
C/C++/Fortran extensions). But it was an awful experience.

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

Yes, other people have stated this as well. On the other hand, what I
am doing with bento "feels" obvious within the numpy/scipy community
as far as I can tell. I think it mostly boils down to different
backgrounds and different concerns. If you were building/developing
complex C extensions daily, you would understand our issues much
better from experience, and I guess I would understand better what
distutils2 is about if I were doing web development.

There is also a strong disagreement on how to do deployment - it has
been stated that pypi current philosophy of not enforcing metadata
policy will stay in place, whereas I am absolutely convinced it is the
root of most pypi issues. On this, we will only ever be able to agree
on disagreeing I am afraid.

David