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

[Ralf Gommers]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 6:50 PM, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk>
wrote:

> 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.
>

I don't have a problem with this, at least it avoids the main issues I
pointed out. Although I also don't see much benefit of adding the code to
distutils as well, given that the non-setuptools use is effectively
deprecated (by not adding support for new PEPs in distutils for example)
and less and less relevant every year.


> 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.
>

This patch is pretty short and understandable, so not bad.


> 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.
>

This I don't agree with - packaging is fundamentally different for the
reasons Donald gave.

Ralf


> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20160825/8277ceaa/attachment-0001.html>