[Distutils] Comments on PEP 426

[Donald Stufft]

On Sep 4, 2013, at 6:21 AM, "M.-A. Lemburg" <mal at egenix.com> wrote:

> I quite like the idea of using setup.py as high level
> interface to a package for installers to use, since that
> avoids having to dig into the details built into the
> setup.py code (and whether it uses setuptools, bento,
> custom code, etc.).

I like it as a temporary solution that is backwards compatible with the old
tooling but I don't think it should be the interface going into the future.

If I recall correctly Tarek started out trying to improve distutils and ended
up inadvertently breaking things which ended up getting his changes
backed out and the block on changes to distutils was placed and the
distutils2/packaging effort was started.

All of this completely skirts the fact that any change to distutils would only
be available in 3.4+ or 3.5+ which makes it's value practically zero. It's
not like other modules in the library where you can reasonably expect
someone to have a backport installed if you need to use the new features.
Setuptools has already gone through the long process of getting everyone
to get it installed, why would we want to go through that again for a system
that should eventually be deprecated entirely?

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

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