[Distutils] The future of invoking pip

[Paul Moore]

On 11 November 2015 at 14:48, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> Right. I think PEP 426 fell into the same trap that distutils2 fell into. It attempted to boil the ocean in one step and the longer it went on the more aspirational stuff got layered onto it because it was being held up as the great hope for packaging.

Yeah. We really should have seen that happening - when people start
using "Metadata 2.0" as a shorthand for "we're working on it", but
there are no actual changes being delivered, that's a bad sign.

Just shows how hard it is, even when we *know* the issue from bitter
experience, to avoid falling into the same old trap.

People like Nathaniel popping up and saying "look, let's just solve
this one piece of the puzzle right now" are a great catalyst for
getting us out of that rut. (Even if "... never is often better than
*right* now" :-)

> I think the lessons we’ve learned is that careful [1] incremental improvements is the best way forward. It’s a lot easier to reason and handle a small change than it is to handle a massive change.

Agreed. We work best when we're alternating between phases of
incrementally adding new functionality, re-stabilising after change,
and paying off technical debt. Changes that are too big disrupt that
rhythm.

Paul