[Distutils] PEP470, backward compat is a ...

[Donald Stufft]

On May 16, 2014, at 1:35 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 16 May 2014 18:10, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> We can have a singular
>> clear message that says "If you want to do X then use these flags" and it
>> doesn't matter what version you're on. I vastly prefer that to the current
>> situation (and the "just let the deprecation run it's course" proposal) where
>> you have to pick the right combination of flags based on pip version.
> 
> I see the deprecation proposal as more a case of going straight for
> the clear "use these flags" message, but holding off on breaking
> people's code immediately, and rather saying "if you're still using
> any of the old mess, we plan on removing it following the normal
> deprecation process, but we recommend changing now, as the better
> mechanisms are already available and are backward compatible"
> 
> Or, to put it another way, using --extra-index-url/--find-links is an
> available solution *right now*. We can immediately switch to promoting
> that both to end users and to package authors.
> 
> PEP 370 then becomes simply the means of deprecating and removing all
> the old functionality, and clarifying the way that package maintainers
> should support the alternative (I won't say "new" as it's been
> available forever) extra index approach if they still want to host
> externally. Add some bits to describe what should happen with
> unmaintained packages[1], and how we propose to offer enhanced
> discoverability of extra indexes, and that's it.
> 
> Paul
> 
> [1] I'm assuming that we don't have any cases where authors of
> maintained packages hosted outside of PyPI refuse to set up an index
> page. There's no technical reason why they should do so, but there
> remains the possibility of non-technical issues that need to be
> thrashed out, and consensus reached with the conclusions documented in
> the PEP.

Right, I think maybe we're agreeing? If we're not I'm not sure what the delta
is between what Carl's saying and what the PEP is (attempting?) to convey.

I think I need to make this clearer in the PEP. I had always assumed that
PEP 470 implicitly came with the assumption that the --allow-external and
friends would be deprecated as part of this PEP. I had assumed that the same
release which adds the discover UX discussed in the PEP would also deprecate
those flags since you need that server side support to not just toss people
out without any guidance.

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

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