[Distutils] command hooks...

[Éric Araujo]

Hi again,

> Is Distutils2 kind of your baby?  Simply, you are the only one working
> on it!
It’s more like my foster kid.  At first there was distutils, in the
standard library since 1999.  After a few years it stopped being
actively developed, and people started to rely on undocumented behavior
and internal things.  Four years ago Tarek Ziadé became the new
maintainer for distutils and attacked the big pile of bugs and feature
requests.  He hit a barrier when his changes broke other people’s code,
so it was decided two years ago to stop adding new features or clean up
code in distutils and instead start anew in a project named distutils2,
where backward compatibility would not stall all improvement efforts.
That’s when I started contributing, as a Google Summer of Code student
and then a volunteer.  Tarek focused on distutils2 and passed on the
maintenance of distutils to me, and later I also became the maintainer
of distutils2, i.e. I reply to most bugs and make the releases.  Tarek
is still the lead of the project and weighs in for important changes.

> I am curious as to what you mean by this statement, when I get
> some spare round tuits?
That’s a wordplay from the expression “I’ll get around to it” → “I’ll
get a round tuit”.

> From the bug tracker page, this has been around for over a year!
Bugs live from a few minutes to a few years; with more than 300 bugs on
my list, I can’t get to everything at the same time.  For the last
months I’ve also been busy with paperwork and a new job.  But be sure
the bug is not forgotten; it’s one of the things that will be fixed
before distutils2 1.0 and Python 3.3.0.

> I applied the diff file that was attached to the page to the current
> Python-3.3.0a2, and it doesn't make a bit of difference on the
> outcome...
If you read the full bug report you’ll see that this patch was already
applied and only fixes setup hooks; I said that I was working on a patch
for commands hooks but I did not upload it as it was not finished.

> I also added the path to sys.path, like this:
> sys.path.append(os.getcwd()) and it doesn't make a difference!
Probably because you did that in your code, but that makes no difference
because it happens after pysetup is started and tries to import your
module.  I don’t know if I’ll have time to fix this bug tomorrow, as
I’ll have mentoring to do, so no promises here.

> After the upcoming Distutils2 sprint, when will the work be patched
> into Distutils2?  When will we see the benefit of all the work that
> will be done???
The changes from the sprint will go into the main repository
immediately, and after a short while they will get ported into packaging
in the cpython repository.  I want to release distutils2 1.0a5 soon
after the sprint.

> 1) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47247655/create_setup_cfg.py
> [...]
> 1) Will create the setup.cfg file if one is not there...?
As you’re using open('setup.cfg', 'w'), the file will be recreated each
time you run the script.  I’m not sure you need that script; why not
just create the config file once and keep it updated when you have changes?

Regards