[Distutils] Deleting legacy contents from core install guide?

[Paul Moore]

On 23 February 2014 11:43, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> With that content gone from the end user installation guide in 3.4+,
> it can become just a very, very simple introduction to the core pip
> commands, and then a reference out to the packaging user guide for
> more info.
>
> Thoughts?

Are "setup.py install" and "setup.py build" being officially relegated
to undocumented status? That's a genuine question, I don't have a
particular reason to object if the answer is "yes".

But if they aren't, will there still be documentation anywhere that covers:

1. Running setup.py install will install your project.[1]
2. The locations of the distutils.cfg files.
3. How to use mingw on Windows, including setting the compiler in
distutils.cfg.[3]

[1] Ideally, that should also explain what this *doesn't* do in
comparison to pip. But that's a matter of enhancing the documentation
rather than removing legacy stuff.
[2] Given that mingw support has some long-standing bugs and issues,
it may be that it doesn't even work any more. But if that's true, we
should officially desupport it and mark all the relevant bugs as
closed/wontfix. If it *is* supported, though, we need to make sure
that somewhere we explain how to build with mingw. (At the moment, pip
says nothing on the matter, relying on the user setting his default
compiler appropriately, which means via the instructions in this
section, I guess). That may be something for the PUG, so moving this
content to the PUG might be reasonable.

I agree on the general principle of getting rid of stuff that's
outdated and we don't want to support, but "it's still in the 3.3 docs
and source control" isn't quite enough - we need to be clear that we
are effectively making stuff undocumented.

Paul