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

[Donald Stufft]

> On Aug 21, 2016, at 5:18 AM, Sylvain Corlay <sylvain.corlay at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> With this reasoning, nothing should ever be added to the standard library.


Packaging is a bit different than other things because the network effect is much more prominent. There’s no real way to say, install a backport if you need one, you just have to kind of wait until every has upgraded which is unlikely other bits of the standard library. In addition, people writing projects in Python that are designed to be distributed, they tend to need to work across many versions of Python, while someone writing a project for themselves only need to worry about whatever version of Python they are deploying to. So while the new statistics module is, even without a backport, immediately useful to people developing their own projects for a recent version of Python, something in distutils is not useful for package authors until it is the *minimum* version of Python they support.

This generally makes the reward for changing distutils very small, particularly with the 3.x split because very few authors are willing to drop 2.7 much less go straight to 3.6 (or whatever) and for people making their own, internal projects, distutils isn’t generally used a whole lot there either.

—
Donald Stufft



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