[Distutils] Undelying design is fundamentally difficult to extend was: Remove distutils, was: red, green, refactor ...

[Thomas Güttler]

Am 21.10.2015 um 14:55 schrieb David Cournapeau:
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> On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 12:52 PM, Thomas Güttler <guettliml at thomas-guettler.de <mailto:guettliml at thomas-guettler.de>> wrote:
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>     Am 21.10.2015 um 13:28 schrieb Ionel Cristian Mărieș:
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>         On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 1:42 PM, Thomas Güttler <guettliml at thomas-guettler.de <mailto:guettliml at thomas-guettler.de> <mailto:guettliml at thomas-guettler.de <mailto:guettliml at thomas-guettler.de>>> wrote:
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>              Why not deprecate and remove distutils?
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>         ​Should we or can we? There was an attempt at that, called distutils2. I'd love to hear what people have learnt from that.
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>         And if now-days walking around with pants instead of only underwear is the way to go, should we still have underwear
>         under the pants? I think yes :-) In other words, setuptools uses distutils.
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>     ok, at the moment setuptools uses distutils.
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>     Why not melt them together into **one** underwear-pants-module?
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> 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.

I hope to be getting this: Packaging Python will be KISS.

If setuptools in inside Python, then different versions of Python each have their matching version included.

If a package has the need for newer version of setuptool, it provides the hint somewhere: required_setuptools_version>=N.M

Then the matching version from pypi gets downloaded first. 

Looks straight forward for me. 


> 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.

If the underlying design is fundamentally difficult to extend, what should be done?

Build tools on top of it? I guess this is not a good idea. 

Or start from scratch and deprecate the current underlying design in the future?

What do you think?

Regards,
  Thomas



-- 
http://www.thomas-guettler.de/