[Distutils] PEP439 and backward compat / easy_install / distlib

[Erik Bray]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 1:23 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> My vision for the setuptools deprecation process is that distutils
> rides into the sunset with it. In this future eventually bugs in
> setuptools will be solved by porting setup.py to one of (X, Y, Z)
> which haven't necessarily been invented yet.

That would be nice (really!) but what are you proposing replace it for
building packages with heavy reliance on C extensions?  Because for
that one use case (and perhaps that alone) it works "pretty okay" for
most cases.  I don't want to start seeing an infinite number of ways
to configure and build extension modules.  The great thing about using
distutils (or some variant) for this is that if I had the source for a
package I could just `./setup.py build` and it would "just work" for
all but the most complex cases (SciPy for example).

I don't want to have a situation where some projects are using bento
and others are using scons and some are using waf and others are using
autoconf, etc, etc.  It's fine if a few projects have their own
special needs for build toolchains and I've been saying all along that
building should be separate from installing, and it should be easier
to drop in one's own build system.

Another thing that setuptools provides that currently works "pretty
well" with extension modules is `./setup.py develop`.  It calls
`setup.py build_ext --inplace` to make extension modules importable.
Any build system for extension modules needs to be able to do
something similar to support in-place install functionality like
`setup.py develop`, `pip install -e`, etc.

Erik