[Distutils] a plea for backward-compatibility / smooth transitions

[Donald Stufft]

On Jul 29, 2013, at 1:01 PM, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:

> Signed PGP part
> On 07/29/2013 10:51 AM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> > I've personally gotten or seen more complaints over the naming of a
> > variable in the config file then I have over any changes we've made.
> > The runner up to that is the fallout from switching to requiring
> > verified SSL.
> 
> The past few months have generated a *lot* of teeth-gnashing /
> hair-pulling, especially among "downstream" developers (those unlikely to
> be reading this SIG):
> 
> - - HTTPS-only PyPY

I've seen very few people complain about this. It's probably the largest issue in either of the projects I'm involved with.

> 
> 
> - - Distribute / setuptools merge, e.g. cratering folks who use a
>   distro-managed 'python-distribute' package.

This is the biggest issue. I wasn't involved and it could have been handled better sure.

> 
> 
> - - Pip's new backward-imcompatible "final releases by default".

Again this negatively affects very few packages and it positively affects a number of people who were bit by the fact that pip does this. SQLAlchemy was one of the ones that were offhand. People don't realize the tools *didn't* do this and often times caused pain inadvertently for the down stream developers.

> 
> 
> I think we are going to be in a much better place for all that, but let's
> not deny the pain involved for *everybody* in getting there.
> 
> 
> Tres.
> - -- 
> ===================================================================
> Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
> Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
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-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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