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

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016, at 07:15 AM, Sylvain Corlay wrote:
> I find this worrying that the main arguments to not include a patch
> would be that
>
>  - this part of the standard library is not very maintained (things
>    don't get merged)
>  - earlier versions of won't have it

Would it make sense to add it to both distutils and setuptools? The
standard library continues to evolve, projects that require Python 3.6
wouldn't need to use setuptools, but we could start using it sooner.
There's obviously some cost in code duplication; I haven't looked at the
code in question, so I don't know how bad this is.

I've run into this argument before when trying to change things in non-packaging-
related parts of the stdlib, and I agree with Sylvain that it's
fundamentally problematic. If we're trying to improve the stdlib, we're
obviously taking a long view, but that's how we ensure the stdlib is
still useful in a few years time. This goes for packaging tools as much
as anything else.

I already have projects where I'm happy to require Python >=3.4, so
being able to depend on Python 3.6 is not such a distant prospect.

Thomas
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