[Distutils] What is the official position on distutils?

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Tue, 30 Aug 2016 14:44:10 +0100
Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30 August 2016 at 13:38, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> > On Tue, 30 Aug 2016 13:34:22 +0100
> > Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:  
> >>
> >> From what I know, anyone who is actually hacking into the internal
> >> APIs to that level tends to use only distutils (probably because as
> >> you say, setuptools is even worse) and therefore falls into my
> >> category of "people affected by distutils changes who won't mind if a
> >> change is made to setuptools".  
> >
> > Except when, as you point out, pip injects setuptools nilly-willy when
> > running setup.py?  
> 
> I'm confused. People who hack into distutils internals can't cope with
> having setuptools injected (because their hacks conflict with
> setuptools' hacks).

I'm not sure what you mean by that.  I'm sure there are situations
where it works (I can't remember for sure whether it did the last time
I did such "hacking").

The thing is, more and more problem expect packages to install with
"pip install ." and they report bugs for that (the PyPA's official
discours is of course partly responsible for this, since it's
insisting so heavily on using pip and discouraging direct calls to
setup.py).

And the day people expect all libraries to be available as wheel files,
it will probably become worse, because I don't know how to produce
wheel files using plain distutils.

Regards

Antoine.