[Distutils] What is the official position on distutils?

[Ned Deily]

On Aug 28, 2016, at 22:28, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> The grey area is cases like the one Sylvain is proposing, where it's a
> straightforward API addition to distutils with no backwards
> compatibility implications, and where we (as in distutils-sig/PyPA)
> want to encourage people to write build scripts a certain way (in this
> case, failing with a useful error message when particular compiler
> features aren't available, rather than confronting end users with a
> cryptic C/C++ compiler error).
> 
> For these cases, I think the value of including the change in
> distutils isn't so much a practical software development one, as it is
> an advertising opportunity: the What's New for 3.6 can not only
> mention the addition and recommendation for use, it can point people
> to setuptools as a version independent way of accessing the same
> capability. There are still a *lot* of people out there for whom the
> standard library *is* Python, and the feature releases are one of our
> best opportunities to reach those folks with notifications that the
> world has changed around them, and they may need to adapt their
> development practices accordingly.

I rebooted the discussion of Sylvain's http://bugs.python.org/issue26689 here because I think decisions about Distutils API changes rightly fall under the purview of the PyPA / Distutils SIG.  With my 3.6 release manager hat on, I'd like to make sure there is agreement here before accepting this change for the release.  So, my understanding is that an acceptable course of action, as outlined by Nick, would be to see the "has_flag" method supplied by Distutils for 3.6 *and* by setuptools for use in older releases.  If so, I think the following things need to happen:

1. Someone from the PyPA (Nick?) should formally review and approve Sylvain's patch on the bug tracker.

2. Someone needs to open a setuptools issue and get agreement on the setuptools changes.

3. Someone needs to write the doc changes for 3.6, e.g. the What's New "advertising" and the changes to the Distutils documentation "Distributing Python Modules (Legacy version)" (Doc/distuils).  Anywhere else?

Is that a fair summary?

Thanks for everyone's input on this!
--Ned

--
  Ned Deily
  nad at python.org -- []