[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Vinay Sajip]

Lennart Regebro <regebro <at> gmail.com> writes:

> It makes no sense to have a tools for developers that does everything
> including running building, running tests and packaging, and another
> tool that does nothing but installs, and creates wheel packages.
> 
> Making wheels should be a part of the tool using for packaging, not
> the tool used for installing.

Don't forget that developers are users too - they consume packages as well as
developing them. I see no *conceptual* harm in a tool that can do
archive/build/install, as long as it can do them well (harder to do than to say,
I know). And
I see that there is a place for just-installation functionality which does not
require the presence of a build environment. But a single tool could have
multiple guises, just as some Unix tools of old behaved differently according to
which link they were invoked from (the linked-to executable being the same).

Isn't our present antagonism to the idea of having one ring to bind them all
due to the qualities specific to that ring (setup.py, calls to setup())?

Regards,

Vinay Sajip