[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Donald Stufft]

On 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())?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Vinay Sajip
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig


Basically this. There no need to *enforce* that the toolchain each be separate pieces, but rather ensure that it *can*. The current status quo means setuptools (or distutils) are the only name in the game, if you want to do anything else you have to pretend you are setuptools. In short setuptools owns the entire process. The goal here is to break it up so no one tool owns the entire process, but still allow tools to act as more then one part of the process when it makes sense.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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