[Distutils] Future of setuptools and buildout

[David Cournapeau]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 6:30 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 20 August 2016 at 02:46, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> > Maybe the alternative to setuptools_lite is to set up one of these other
> > tools to work well (easily) for building python packages. If it can do
> > everything that setuptools can do (that we want setuptools to do), and
> just
> > as easily, maybe that's the next step forward.
> >
> > but if that isn't happening soon, then a setuptools_lite would be a
> useful
> > step forward.
>
> Enabling folks to more easily use existing build systems like Scons,
> Waf, Meson, CMake, et al is one of the main goals of pyproject.toml.
>
> Daniel Holth has a working Scons proof of concept at
> https://pypi.python.org/pypi/enscons that actually works independently
> of pyproject.toml support in pip by using a boilerplate setup.py to do
> the bootstrapping and invocation of the build system.
>
> It's why we don't particularly want to replace distutils/setuptools
> with any build system in particular - the world actually has a surfeit
> of cross-platform build systems, and many of them are written in
> Python and are hence quite friendly to being bootstrapped for use in
> building Python extension modules.
>

Indeed. Having been involved w/ the mess that is numpy.distutils, this was
(and still is) the major issue w/ distutils for the scientific/pydata crowd.

Conflating packaging and building is an impediment to deploy software to
different platforms (build is generally better handled by developers,
packaging by platform-specific packagers).

David
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