[Distutils] Time for a setuptools_lite??

[Chris Barker]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 2:53 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:

>  As I've already said, we have a plan for that, it's
> just happening slowly (apparently too slowly for some people, but
> rather than helping with it they seem happier to propose alternative
> approaches that we've typically considered in the past and discarded,
>

I'm not exactly sure who (or which proposals) that was aimed at, but my
idea, at least is not an alternative approach at all -- it's small idea for
how to help get there, sooner than later.

It seems the plan is to:

finish hammering out the spec.

Wait for _someone_ to make a new build system.

Then wait how long? decades? for the entire user community to go to some
new build system(s).

Then we can finally deprecate the cruft of setuptools.

Actually -- I like that plan -- and I'll probably be one of the early folks
to jump on the bandwagon of the new build system.

But in the meantime, a way to get my project to build without the
setuptools cruft would be a nice option.

BTW -- this is not just about letting pip work with more than one build
system -- it's also about letting more than one package manage work with
the existing (and other future) build systems.

In conda, for instance, the convention is to call:

python setup.py intstall.

It turns out that now, we _should_ be calling:

pip install ./

to actually get the right thing done. Really?

A setuptools lite would do the right thing with "setup.py install"

Hmm, now that I think about it, maybe I can just banish setuptools from my
setup.py, stick with distutils, and then make sure to use pip to actually
invoke anything -- so it will inject setuptools, but only use the bits we
need....

I'll have to try that.....

-CHB

-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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