[Distutils] moving things forward (was: wheel including files it shouldn't)

[Robert Collins]

Ok so, if i draft a pep for said proposal, will it die under the weight of
a thousand bike sheds?
On 5 May 2016 3:09 PM, "Nick Coghlan" <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 5 May 2016 at 06:28, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> > the only reason I got involved in build system discussions was
> > pushback 18months or so back when I implemented a proof of concept for
> > pip that just used setup.cfg. I'd be very happy to ignore all the
> > build system stuff and just do bootstrap requirements in setup.cfg.
>
> I know I'm one of the folks that has historically been dubious of the
> "just use setup.cfg" idea, due to the assorted problems with the
> ini-style format not extending particularly well to tree-structured
> data (beyond the single level of file sections).
>
> However, my point of view has changed over that time:
>
> 1. We've repeatedly run up against the "JSON is good for programs
> talking to each other, but lousy as a human-facing interface" problem
> 2. By way of PEPs 440 and 508, we've got a lot more experience in
> figuring out how to effectively bless de facto practices as properly
> documented standards (even when it makes the latter more complicated
> than we'd like)
> 3. The ongoing popularity of setup.cfg shows that while ini-style may
> not be perfect for this use case, it clearly makes it over the
> threshold of "good enough"
> 4. Folks that *really* want a different input format (whether that's
> YAML, TOML, or something else entirely) will still be free to treat
> setup.cfg as a generated file, just as setup.py can be a generated
> file today
>
> The last couple of years have also given me a whole range of
> opportunities (outside distutils-sig) to apply the mantra "the goal is
> to make things better than the status quo, not to make them perfect",
> and that has meant getting better at distinguishing what I would do
> given unlimited development resources from what makes the most sense
> given the development resources that are actually available.
>
> So when I ask myself now "What's the *simplest* thing we could do that
> will make things better than the status quo?", then the answer I come
> up with today is your original idea: bless setup.cfg (or at least a
> subset of it) as a standardised interface.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I still think that answer has significant
> downsides - I've just come around to the view that "is likely to be
> easy to implement and adopt" are upsides that can outweigh a whole lot
> of downsides :)
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.
>
> --
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
>
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