[Distutils] A smaller step towards de-specializing setuptools/distutils

[Brett Cannon]

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 at 12:03 Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> On October 29, 2015 at 2:54:19 PM, Daniel Holth (dholth at gmail.com) wrote:
> > I think that would be very handy, especially making setuptools not a
> > special case. You could get it down to 3 lines in setup.cfg, a file that
> > already exists and already gathers random settings.
> >
> > <snip>
>
> I don’t think we should try to use an entry point (at least not yet). One
> of the key points is to minimize the conceptual churn and to move forward
> slowly while still progressing. I don’t think that using a class really
> buys us much because anyone who is capable of writing that class is also
> capable of writing a small CLI interface to be used within a setup.py. It
> feels more like churn for churn’s sake than anything else and some sort of
> idealogical purity over pragmatism.
>

There is also the familiarity of standardizing the CLI that pip will use
when calling setup.py.

The one thing that Daniel's case 3 proposal has over Donald's, though, is
that all data can be self-contained in setup.cfg. If a build tool chooses
to have the user specify all data in setup.cfg then you just copy-and-paste
the `[bootstrap]` part and then in some other section they specify the info
the build tool wants. Donald's approach could do something similar but it
also requires copying around a boilerplate setup.py that is never modified.
It's a familiarity vs. simplicity issue.

Personally I still like the simple setup.py approach for the familiarity of
it as well as the backwards-compatibility/transition bit being so simple
with older versions of setuptools.


>
> I also don’t want to base any standard on setuptools entry points because
> they are not a standard (and if we did, the key should not mention pip at
> all, pip shouldn’t be special cased any more than setuptools should).
>

Well, it kind of is a standard thanks to Paul and zipapp:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/zipapp.html#module-zipapp


>
> -----------------
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372
> DCFA
>
>
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