[Distutils] tourist here, with a dumb RTFM question

[Michael Bayer]

Thanks for this response, Jason!    Your thoughtfulness is appreciated.

- mike




On Mar 8, 2014, at 9:10 AM, Jason R. Coombs <jaraco at jaraco.com> wrote:

> Thanks Mike for the report. I haven't read the rest of this thread yet, and I want to respond to your OP before I do. As a result, there will likely be some duplication.
> 
> You're absolutely right to be dismayed.
> 
> I had incorrectly assessed the potential impact of this change. I had expected the impact to be minor and isolated. I underestimated the number of systems that automatically upgrade Setuptools as well as the number of packages that could be using Features. I relied too heavily on the DeprecationWarning to have flagged the breakage (to package maintainers and their users). I had expected issues like you raised in this post to have been hashed out or at least raised long before I considered the release.
> 
> I hope my decision to backout the release serves as a strong signal that this type of breakage is unacceptable. I hope the tickets filed and discussion will lead to a better mechanism for communicating these types of changes in the future. In the future, I will leverage Twitter to announce in advance any backward-incompatible releases, giving additional visibility and oversight.
> 
> I do also want to ask that deployment teams consider the implications of always upgrading to the latest release of Setuptools. I'm encouraged that they do, and I do want to keep that as a viable deployment workflow. However, at the same time, there is some inherent risk with automatically upgrading to known-backward-breaking versions. The purpose of adopting semver for versioning is to allow the project to signal directly and unambiguously when a release is backward-breaking. I haven't yet decided when or where to raise this discussion, and it certainly doesn't excuse the challenges faced Thursday.
> 
> It's clear to me from your post that there are use-cases for Features that aren't covered by simply "using extras". Namely, extras doesn't support exclusion, only inclusion. I'll make mention of that in the deprecation ticket (https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/issue/65/) and follow up after understanding the problem better.
> 
> I'm the one that needs to apologize, not you. Thanks for your patience and understanding as I and the rest of the PyPA work toward the best means of communication (that doesn't require every package maintainer to follow distutils-sig).
> 
> Best regards,
> Jason
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Distutils-SIG [mailto:distutils-sig-
>> bounces+jaraco=jaraco.com at python.org] On Behalf Of Michael Bayer
>> Sent: Thursday, 06 March, 2014 12:56
>> To: distutils-sig at python.org
>> Subject: [Distutils] tourist here, with a dumb RTFM question
>> 
>> Hi Distutils !
>> 
>> I don't follow this list and haven't looked at it in a long time.   However, I'm
>> learning via twitter that a brand new setuptools release that's just gone out
>> has just removed the "Feature" mechanism.
>> 
>> Now as you're all rolling your eyes and preparing to bang out frustrated
>> replies how this was well announced and deprecated and warned about and
>> wow really didn't you know the term paper was due today, OK first off let me
>> say I am sorry!  I am not a distutils/setuptools maintainer.    I am just
>> someone that uses it, and as I include setuptools in my setup.py, I am also
>> getting thousands of other people who download my product to use it as
>> well.    And I don't read the setuptools changelog!  Or the setuptools blog.  Or
>> this list.  I assume you guys have it under control (and you certainly do!).
>> There seem to be other people like me (people who write very widely used
>> software) who also seem surprised!   And that is surprising too (as I am
>> usually the only person to be surprised by these things that should not be
>> surprising).  So I hope you can hold back your frustration with my clueless
>> RTFMness long enough to answer these questions:
>> 
>> 1. where was this announced?   I'm wondering why there weren't loud
>> blaring blog posts and tweets all over the place stating that on March 6,
>> dozens of major packages are going to all break.
>> 
>> 2. what is the plan for unmaintained packages and old versions of existing
>> packages on pypi that "import Feature" and can no longer be installed?    Is it
>> just the case that a large amount of pypi just won't install anymore?
>> 
>> 3. What, if any, is the recommended approach going forward to a Python
>> package that wishes to specify a command-line flag during install.  Here's
>> multiple choice:
>> 
>>    a. you can use new setuptools API <some new way to add -flags>
>> 
>>    b. you can roll it yourself in setup.py using <hack X>
>> 
>>    c. your setup.py should never accept any kind of flags as that interferes
>> with <up-and-coming use case Q>
>> 
>>    d. other
>> 
>> If choice c., then here is another question.  My library includes optional C
>> extensions.   On certain platforms, these C extensions don't build (like on
>> Pypy, or on Windows if you don't have compilation tools installed).  In this
>> regard it gracefully degrades.  But also, I want to be able to have a command
>> line option to determine this as well.  Because!  Maybe I'm installing within a
>> test suite where I need to test the entire library without the C extensions
>> built.    Maybe some user has found a bug in the C extensions, and that user
>> needs to temporarily install the tool without the extensions built.    Other
>> cases for flags are, maybe your library can build with or without SSL support,
>> something like that.
>> 
>> Keep in mind, I actually *won't* be getting bug reports about this because
>> my setup.py already gracefully degrades to distutils!  But still, I'd like to have
>> my -without-cextensions flag somehow.
>> 
>> Thanks for listening and again I apologize for not following the setuptools
>> changelog on a regular basis!
>> 
>> 
>> - mike
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig