[Distutils] pip vs easy_install vs distutils2

Tarek Ziadé ziade.tarek at gmail.com
Tue Jun 1 10:27:11 CEST 2010


On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:12 AM, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:
[..]
> In terms of release cycles I'm also somewhat uncomfortable with the
> extraction of the VCS support... it feels more like a political concession
> than a good technical decision.  I don't want the brokenness of the stdlib
> process to drive choices in pip.  I also don't think it should drive choices
> in distutils2, and I don't think it's healthy for distutils2, but it's not
> my project so I'll only offer that as advice.

Sounds like the stdlib is hell to you ;)

More seriously, how do you define a package that is a good candidate
for the stdlib in that case?
If there's no good definition, doesn't it mean that there's a higher
level problem ?
Like, the length of the release cycle of the sdtlib itself ?

>
> I strongly support the addition of a new category of library that is
> somewhere between the standard library and just-another-library, a library
> with some authority and support in the community, but with a separate
> release cycle entirely.  There's a lot of libraries that should be like
> this, but it's not too painful because most of them are pretty much "done"
> -- they've had very few changes or additions (maybe for good reasons, maybe
> not).  I think distutils/setuptools/distutils2/pip reveal the need for this
> category more than many packages because they are both important and need
> community approval, but are very much Not Done and I think will probably
> never be done (since they interact with so many moving parts some of which
> aren't part of Python at all).

I am not sure what this would mean for the end-user (a fat release of Python ?)
and maybe Pip belongs to that category.

For Distutils2 though, most part of it will not change a lot within a
Python release,
(beside bugfix of course). For example, modules like "version", or "metadata"
won't move too much.

I guess we will work on a lighter script on our side then.

Regards
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org


More information about the Distutils-SIG mailing list