[Distutils] Creating distribution for Python *module*, not package

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Tue Apr 1 23:31:55 CEST 2014


On Apr 1, 2014, at 5:24 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On 2 Apr 2014 06:41, "Paul Moore" <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 1 April 2014 21:16, Michael Merickel <mmericke at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Yeah, setuptools is a bw-compat wrapper around distutils, so it tends to
> > > only document its new features. This approach to documentation makes it very
> > > difficult to understand for newcomers that are not familiar with distutils.
> > > Especially now that setuptools is the de facto standard that everyone is
> > > learning how to use.
> >
> > Agreed. The packaging documentation grew piecemeal over time, staring
> > from a basis of the distutils documentation which was itself pretty
> > incomprehensible. We're working on a new iteration of the packaging
> > documentation at
> > https://python-packaging-user-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ but to
> > be honest, it's very easy to take for granted a lot of basics, simply
> > because the people doing the writing are too close to the packaging
> > ecosystem.
> 
> Marcus has also been doing a lot of work trying to coordinate consistency updates to the stdlib, pip, virtualenv and setuptools docs to get them in sync with each other and bring them into line with the new overall user guide (Now available as packaging.python.org, btw).
> 
> The fact several aspects of the setuptools docs assume readers are already experienced distutils users just happens to be one of the harder problems to resolve in that space, as fixing it requires extracting the relevant info from the 15+ year old distutils docs and combining it with the already complicated setuptools docs :P
> 
> (It's also influenced by the fact that more of the PyPA's focus for the past year has been on cleaning up the installation side of the story. As that has now reached a better state with the release of Python 3.4 and its bundled pip bootstrapping mechanism, I expect we'll see more movement on the build side of things this year)
> 
> Cheers,
> Nick.
> 
> >For example, I don't think anyone considered documenting a
> > single Python module as mentioned by the OP (it's usually the case
> > that your needs very soon grow to the point where a single module
> > isn't enough, but that's not a reason to not cover it - just a
> > possible reason why we never thought of it).
> >
> > We'd be very grateful for any contributions to the packaging user
> > guide, either in the form of pull requests or even just issues on the
> > tracker pointing at things we should cover (or should cover better).
> >
> > Paul
> > _______________________________________________
> > Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig

I was idly considering a setup.py.packaging.python.org or setup.py.python.org earlier that
was something like http://package.json.nodejitsu.com/

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

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20140401/34bcefe5/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 801 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20140401/34bcefe5/attachment.sig>


More information about the Distutils-SIG mailing list