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

[PJ Eby]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 1:33 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Erik Bernoth <erik.bernoth <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> 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>".

Well, I wouldn't necessarily rule out using it to implement (some
portion of) the pkg_resources API, at least on Python 3, as part of
the phasing-it-out process, after packaging feature development has
ended for setuptools on Python 2, or at least Python <2.6.  (The
distinction being that distlib seems to be heavily reliant on features
that only exist in 2.6+.)

Or, to put it somewhat differently, if pkg_resources ever ends up in
the stdlib, it should probably happen in the form of a distlib
wrapper.  ;-)