[Distutils] Future of setuptools and buildout

[Nick Coghlan]

On 18 August 2016 at 08:18, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> IF there were a setuptools_lite, user could simply do:
>
> import setuptools_lite as setuptools
>
> and they'd instantly get an error if they were using depreciated features,
> and their end users would never accidently easy install stuff :-)
>
> Anyway, this seem like a path forward, without having to wait for the future
> fabulous pluggable build system .....

The problem with this is a pragmatic one rather than a philosophical
one, in that setuptools is just plain *hard* to work on, and doesn't
have a particularly robust test suite, so you can easily break other
people's usage while trying to fix the particular issue you personally
care about.

Hence the ongoing efforts to let people more easily use tools that
*aren't* setuptools, rather than attempting to disentangle and
modularise setuptools itself - the architectural challenges are such
that attempting to fix them would inevitably break existing usage,
while we can get most of the same benefits more transparently through
things like declarative dependencies for setup.py execution.

Cheers,
Nick.

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