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

[Ralf Gommers]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 6:10 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> We’re reaching a point where *some* projects are announcing the end of
> Python 2 support as of a certain date, but let us not forget that Python
> 2.7 is still an order of magnitude more than any other version of Python in
> terms of downloads from PyPI.
>

Even in 5 years from now, when almost all projects have dropped support for
Python 2.7, the reasoning remains the same. Projects will then support 3 or
4 Python 3.x versions, so still any new API added to distutils cannot be
used by those projects for 3-4 years. It does not make much sense to add
new things to distutils, with the exception maybe of something needed
particularly for a new Python version (like MSVC 2015 support in Python
3.5).

On top of that there are technical reasons (don't want to test combinations
of python+setuptools that both change per release) and organizational ones
(distutils maintenance is terrible, many simple bugfix patches don't get
merged for ages, setuptools at least fixes regressions quite fast).

I'm not sure if there's an official policy on adding new things to
distutils, but if not then this request is a good time to make one.
Assuming of course that the setuptools devs are willing to merge features
like the one from Sylvain.

Ralf



>
> On Aug 21, 2016, at 2:08 PM, Sylvain Corlay <sylvain.corlay at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Although we are reaching a tipping point where a lot of projects are
> announcing the end of Python 2 support as of a certain date.
>
> Whatever is in the latest version of Python 3 when it will be considered a
> sane decision to have a Python 3-only library will be considered standard.
>
> On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 5:28 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> —
> Donald Stufft
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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