[Distutils] How to handle launcher script importability?

[Nick Coghlan]

On 23 August 2013 00:19, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> When I made that suggestion, I misunderstood your plans for distlib.
>> If pip are only adopting a subset of it, they can't use the same name,
>> or people will get confused.
>
> I can certainly see that there are ways to avoid confusion. But never mind,
> I see that you've made your decision. I would have hoped for a more
> transparent decision process, but that's probably due to my slowness of uptake.

The only decision I've made is to stop saying "distlib is the future",
since that is now in doubt, and I certainly don't have the time
available or expertise needed to review all the APIs that have been
added to it (I thought it was just the four distutils2 interfaces that
almost made it into Python 3.3 and that all your experimental
interfaces were in distil, not distlib. While there was plenty of
evidence to indicate I was wrong in that belief, I wasn't paying
proper attention to it and it didn't properly register until it came
up in this thread).

The next step is up to the pip folks - if they think adopting distlib
wholesale makes sense for them, fine, I have no direct say in that. If
they decide to make a "piplib" instead, to expose a public API for an
updated version of pip's own infrastructure (perhaps derived from
distlib), that's fine by me, too.

The only absolute in this space relates to the default installation
toolchain: it *will* be pip. Unlike setutptools as a build system, I
consider easy_install irredeemable as an installer (from a social
perspective), and there's no way I would ever inflict yet another
change of recommended client on the community.

Given that, any future changes to the core infrastructure will be
heavily influenced by the technical choices of the pip developers.
Other tools will exist around that, since packaging is a complex topic
where "one size" really doesn't fit all, but pip will be the
centrepiece.

Cheers,
Nick.