[Distutils] Comments on PEP 426

[Donald Stufft]

On Aug 31, 2013, at 6:47 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

> Donald Stufft <donald <at> stufft.io> writes:
>>>> with a more complicated 20% "scipy" distutils
>>>> replacement but neither will necessarily need to be in the standard
>>>> library;
>>> 
>>> If users start to have to install third-party software to build and
>>> package their own libraries, then it's a huge regression (regardless
>>> of what *you* may think about "batteries included").
>> 
>> I haven't followed this thread yet, but just to comment on this users are
>> already installing third party software to build and package their own
>> libraries. From what i've seen working with packaging distutils is either
>> a fallback or not used at all in the bulk of cases.
> 
> Which "bulk of cases"?
> 
> If I take a look at some popular libraries (Django, Tornado, Twisted,
> SQLAlchemy), all are able to build without setuptools. Do you have
> any statistics?

I don't have statistics offhand but it's pretty easy to tell if a package was
built with setuptools (it contains slightly different files). I've looked at a lot
of packages while working on packaging and the vast majority of projects
were built with setuptools. I can probably get some sort of numbers worked
up at some point this weekend (although not sure how long it'll take to
process every package on PyPI).

> 
> The sticking point is that you don't *have* to install something third-party
> to get yourself working on some packaging. Being able to benefit from
> additional features *if* you install something else is of course fine.

Out of the four you listed I'm most familiar with Django's packaging which
has gone to significant effort *not* to require setuptools. Most packages
aren't willing to go through that effort and either simply require setuptools
or they include a distutils fallback which often times doesn't work correctly
except in simple cases*.

* Not that it couldn't work correctly just they don't use it so they never personally
experience any brokenness and most people do not directly execute setup.py
so the installers tend to handle the differences/brokenness for them.

> 
> Regards
> 
> Antoine.
> 
> 
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-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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