[Distutils] PEP439 and backward compat / easy_install / distlib

[Daniel Holth]

Did you know that the "wheel convert" command masks wheels from eggs?
On Mar 24, 2013 5:48 AM, "holger krekel" <holger at merlinux.eu> wrote:

> Hi Richard, all,
>
> two first notes on PEP439.
>
> backward compat with present-day release files: the PEP should state
> it as a goal or at least discuss it in some depth.  In that context, the
> choice of providing a bootstrap for pip rather than easy_install needs
> reasoning.  One problem with pip, compared to easy_install, is
> that it doesn't support eggs which is a problem particularly on
> Windows machines where often no fitting C compiler is available.  If the
> remedy here is to support wheels and recommend it's use, it is still a
> backward compatibility problem: many users will not be able to use the
> builtin-supported installer to install todays existing egg release files.
>
> setuptools and distlib:  Even if Python3.4+ had a mature distlib
> providing minimal setuptools functionality, how would it work for the
> typical "python setup.py install" which is invoked by pip?  Often those
> setup.py scripts depend on a setuptools package.
>
> I am highlighting these two backward-compat aspects because otherwise
> we might run into this problem: http://xkcd.com/927/ and i understood
> that most people involved in improving the packaging ecology want
> to avoid that :)
>
> best,
> holger
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20130324/a954c525/attachment.html>