[Distutils] Comments on PEP 426

[Antoine Pitrou]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> On 30 Aug 2013 17:23, "Paul Moore" <p.f.moore <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 30 August 2013 00:08, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan <at> gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> We also need to officially bless pip's trick of forcing the use of
setuptools for distutils based setup.py files.
> >
> >
> > Do we? What does official blessing imply? We've managed for years
without the trick being "official"...
> >
> > The main reason it is currently used is to allow setup.py install to
specify --record, so that we can get the list of installed files. If
distutils added a --record flag, for example, I don't believe we'd need the
hack at all. (Obviously, we'd still need setuptools so we could use wheel to
build wheels, but that's somewhat different as it's a new feature). Maybe a
small distutils patch is better than blessing setuptools here?
> 
> A distutils patch won't help with Python 2.7 or 3.3. The purpose of
blessing the substitution is to decouple the update cycle of the build
system from the update cycle of the standard library.

It sounds like a nasty hack. What you call "substitution" is actually monkey
patching, 
right? (edit: apparently it is pre-loading setuptools, which probably does
the monkey patching by itself)

This is crazy. We removed packaging from the stdlib because it wasn't
"good enough", and now we would "bless the substitution" (aka silent runtime 
monkeypatching) of distutils with setuptools, a third-party library whose stdlib
inclusion has always been widely refused by the community (for many reasons)?

pip can do what it likes, but blessing such behaviour officially sounds
completely 
backwards.

Regards

Antoine.