[Distutils] Remove distutils, was: red, green, refactor ...

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2015 15:30:51 +0300
Ionel Cristian Mărieș <contact at ionelmc.ro> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 3:10 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> 
> > (3) because distutils is part of the standard library and setuptools is
> > most likely unwelcome there :-)
> >
> 
> ​Well, it's not dead yet. Sorry, I mean,​ good enough to be included in the
> stdlib :-)
> 
> But seriously, is it correct to assume that it's not there for largely the
> same reasons pip ain't in stdlib? (and yes, getpip is in stdlib)

setuptools inclusion was discussed long ago AFAIK, and it was refused.
For pip the reasons are different (the much shorter release cycle, the
external dependencies required).

See e.g.:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-April/063966.html
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-April/063886.html

(incidentally, the latter link shows a previous attempt to refactor
distutils was shot down because of backwards compatibility; which is
also why distutils2 was canned, despite bringing concrete positive
enhancements; had those attempts not been shot down, the situation
right now would be significantly better than it is...)

Regards

Antoine.