[Distutils] tourist here, with a dumb RTFM question

[Daniel Holth]

It is certainly broken.

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 1:37 PM, Michael Bayer <mike_mp at zzzcomputing.com> wrote:
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> On Mar 6, 2014, at 1:07 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> pje said:
>>
>> The "Feature()" facility was never completely implemented or
>> supported, and even if it were, it should be deprecated now, as it
>> will not be compatible with the coming packaging systems based on PEP
>> 426. If you need separate features, use separate distributions and
>> "extras" instead.
>
> wait, ok this is that thing.  "separate distributions" means....
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> SQLAlchemy-0.9.3-nocext.tar.gz
> SQLAlchemy-0.9.3-cext.tar.gz
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> ??
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> I think that's what it means.    OK, not sure if I have to say this but that would be...OK very very unworkable.   A Python package distribution is a *source distribution*.  That suggests that one need to package up separate source distributions in order to specify an option, is... OK very very unworkable.   (note by "very very unworkable" I mean "list of hyperboles I had to backspace out because that's not why I'm here").
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> If a package has three flags, now there need to be  *eight source distros*?  Really?   On the plus side, I just used math.
>
> how does one even maintain this in source control?  Do I have setup.py.nocext, setup.py.cext, maintain a copy of 99% the same code in each, then rename them when I do "python setup.py sdist" (since sdist doesn't take command line options either!!)  ?   The suggestion is completely inappropriate.
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> I don't know the metadata format in pep426 well enough to comment (as I wanted to use it one day and found that it seemed to still be pretty much vapor), but I'll reiterate: these are source distributions, not binaries or wheels or anything like that.  A source distro has to build, and builds need options.    A metadata format that purports to represent metadata about a source distribution and does not support flags is a broken metadata format.
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