[Distutils] some questions about PEP470

[Stefan Krah]

Donald Stufft <donald <at> stufft.io> writes:

> If you're this upset over someone redistributing your work, then maybe
> Open Source Software is the wrong hobby for you.

Usually one does not tell a core developer that his contributions are
"a hobby".  I have contributed 40000+ lines of original, dense C code,
backed by 100% code coverage and 30000+ lines of ACL2 proofs.

These days it may be more productive to hack other people's brains and
produce 10000+ tweets in order to have more political influence.


It's great that my code is distributed with Python.  Likewise, it was great
to work with Matthias Klose and Hans-Peter Jansen to produce Debian, Ubuntu,
and OpenSuse packages.  cdecimal is also distributed by NetBSD, ActiveState,
continuum.io, and others.


The difference here is that the above persons and entities respect people.
They respect software.  The package maintainers are very competent and easy
to work with.


> Nonetheless I told you how to get that remediated and as of yet I don't
> see an open support request from you on it.

My interest in cleaning up PyPI is practically zero now.  In the end, who
cares what m3-cdecimal was supposed to accomplish:  Maybe they wanted to
teach me a lesson, maybe they were upset about a minor detail, maybe they
have a zero-day exploit for tar and that's their delivery mode.

All I know is that they didn't even run ``make distclean'' before packaging,
so some user info is present in config.log.


Some problems can only be fixed by a curated distribution run by neutral 
maintainers.


> I think you might want to rethink this strategy if it's your goal, unless
> the view point you're trying to push is that I was right all along because
> there are a number of people* who previously didn't think it was a big deal
> but now agree with me since they couldn't install cdecimal because
bytrereef.org
> was down.


Shrug.  This is more loss of interest than a strike!  Even it were a strike,
the observation is not particularly interesting:  Any strike (think railway)
potentially alienates some users.

Anyway, it will be kind of tough to force U.S. exceptionalism via the terms
and conditions on an international body of authors if only uploaded packages
are allowed.



Stefan Krah