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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 22 October 2015 at 18:15, Thomas Güttler
<guettliml at thomas-guettler.de> wrote:
> Am 21.10.2015 um 14:55 schrieb David Cournapeau:
>> 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.

No, this is what got us into the problem with distutils: we want the
packaging system to be *version independent*, as many projects want to
support multiple versions of Python. Having the build system be
runtime version dependent turns out to be a huge pain.

This is why Microsoft versions Visual Studio separately from Windows,
Apple versions Xcode separately from Mac OS X, and Red Hat versions
the RHEL Developer Toolset separately from RHEL itself.

However, we also have more than a decade's worth of existing projects
on PyPI that we can't force to switch to a new build system, so we
need to ensure any improvements we make benefit *existing* projects,
even if they never get updated again.

Cheers,
Nick.

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