[Distutils] Time for a setuptools_lite??

[Chris Barker]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:26 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> On October 21, 2015 at 3:13:11 PM, Chris Barker (chris.barker at noaa.gov)
> wrote:
> >
> > replace all your "import setuptools" with "import setuptool_lite" would
> be
> > clear what the intent was -- i.e. not YET ANOTHER brand new build
> system...
>


> Moving from one “one true build system” to another “one true build system”
> is unlikely.


sure -- but I'm not even talking about another special purpose build system.

A far better approach IMO is the one we’re taking. Define standard
> *formats* and let end users select whatever tool they want to create things
> that adhere to that format.


yes -- fabulous -- but you need API as well as format, yes? i.e if pip is
going to be able to find a source package and build and install it, it
needs to know how to do that, ideally without knowing what the build tool
is. So that's API, yes?

(maybe plain old setup.py build" is a fine API...

As I understand it, the current "API" that pip knows about is:

"some subset of what setuptools provides"

So my proposal is here is to provide a way for users to easily use jsut
that subset. This would:

- give folks like me a way to avoid easy-install, etc...
- give all of us a way to start moving our packages to a structure that
will be better suited to the upcoming orthogonal build-install toolchains.
- give those folks involved in the planning a concrete way to know, for
sure what people really need (or really use, anyway), both for features and
API.

In short -- aside from the distraction issue, this is a way to help us get
to the future we want, not an alternative to that future.

This lets people create really focused tools for particular use cases, you
> can have a dead simple one for pure python things that never need to worry
> about the complexity of building C libraries


which distutils isn't so bad at, eh? :-)

-CHB



-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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Chris.Barker at noaa.gov
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