[Distutils] User Viewpoint: Packaging History, Confusion and User Advice

[Vinay Sajip]

Erik Bernoth <erik.bernoth <at> gmail.com> writes:

> As a side note I like many sections in the distlib documentation [7].

Thanks for this feedback. Since distlib is under active development the
API reference section lags behind, but I've tried to keep the overview and
tutorial sections updated. If you have any specific comments about how
these sections could be improved, please raise an issue on the distlib
tracker with your suggestions.

[11])distribute - fork of setuptools [12], 
> which is supported to the current day. I don't know if it has any 
> feature improvements over setuptools but I guess it should be at least 
> less buggy.

The main feature improvements in distribute are (a) Python 3 support and
(b) better support for recent metadata developments.


> distlib is currently still in alpha and will likely be added under the
> hood into setuptools anyway, when it's time.

Not sure about that - it's meant to supplant setuptools and avoid setup.py
altogether, whereas distutils and setuptools/distribute are pretty much
tied to "python setup.py <command>".

> distil - a packaging tool like setuptools purely built on top of the
> current state of distlib (?)

It's more like pip than setuptools, but it aims to offer all packaging
roles without using "python setup.py <command>". Meant as a testbed for
distlib, but it already performs package building, source packaging,
installation/uninstallation/upgrading pretty well for a tool in its early
stages of development. (Of course more testing is required, and people here
can definitely help with that by trying it out.)

Thanks for your post summarising the state of the packaging union, it will
definitely help to orient new packaging users/packagers in the right direction.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip