[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 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())?

I really think so. distutils is a bad implementation. This has a lot
more to do with how it works internally than how its command line
interface looks. We can have new tools that do everything with a
single command but really delegate the work out to separate decoupled
and hopefully pluggable pieces underneath.