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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 21 October 2015 at 14:55, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Thomas Güttler
> <guettliml at thomas-guettler.de> wrote:
>> ok, at the moment setuptools uses distutils.
>>
>> Why not melt them together into **one** underwear-pants-module?
>
>
> What do you hope getting from that ? distutils is in the stdlib, so cannot
> change easily, and even if putting setuptools in the stdlib were possible,
> you would now need to handle different versions of setuptools for different
> versions of python.

It's more useful to go the other direction and vendor a modern version
of distutils inside setuptools:
https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/issues/417/adopt-distutils

distutils can then optionally be replaced wholesale at runtime, rather
than having the internals be monkeypatched.

> On top of this, the goal of lots of efforts around packaging is to allow
> people to move away from distutils/setuptools, as the underlying design is
> fundamentally difficult to extend.

We still need a migration path to modern metadata standards for
everyone using distutils and setuptools - that's the side of things
that caused major problems for both distribute and distutils2.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia