[Distutils] Proposed new Distutils API for compiler flag detection (Issue26689)

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Aug 20, 2016 3:09 PM, "Sylvain Corlay" <sylvain.corlay at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Ralf,
>
> On Sat, Aug 20, 2016 at 11:42 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com>
wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On python-dev and in the bug tracker, Sylvain has understandably asked
for a review with an eye to adding this new feature to Python 3.6 whose
feature code cutoff is scheduled for a few weeks from now.  As release
manager, I am not opposed in general to adding new features to Distutils
but I think we should be very cautious about modifying or adding new
Distutils APIs, given that many third-party distribution authors want to
support their packages on multiple versions.  So I want to make sure that
there is some agreement that adding this new API starting with 3.6 is a
good thing to do rather than having it go in under the radar.
>>
>>
>> I'd rather see that kind of thing added to setuptools. We're already
having to deal with setuptools as a moving target, so if distutils becomes
one again as well that means more testing with combinations of different
Python and setuptools versions. Imho distutils changes should be bugfix and
essential maintenance only.
>>
>
>
> Having the `has_flag` in a different location from `has_function` would
be weird in my opinion.

I think the point though is that in your proposal, has_flag is in distutils
3.6, but has_function is in distutils 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6. So
they're still in different places in practice, and if your new feature is
only in distutils 3.6 then almost no one will be able to use it within the
next 3+ years. Otoh putting it in setuptools makes it uniformly usable for
everyone immediately.

-n
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