[Distutils] What is the official position on distutils?

[Nick Coghlan]

On 2 September 2016 at 19:28, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2 September 2016 at 09:58, Sylvain Corlay <sylvain.corlay at gmail.com> wrote:
>> My point here was that I don't think that the proposed feature has much to
>> do with the concerns that were raised about distutils in general, unless it
>> is decided that incremental improvements to the library even backward
>> compatible will not be accepted anymore.
>
> Agreed. I think your feature is only stalled for distutils by the lack
> of people sufficiently comfortable with the code to apply it. The
> suggestions to add it to setuptools are more in the way of practical
> advice on how to make the feature available, rather than expressions
> of a policy that "we don't make changes like that in the stdlib".

However, one of the other consequences of the status quo is that if
Jason's comfortable with a change for setuptools, there's very rarely
going to be anyone that will argue with him if he also considers it a
suitable addition to the next version of distutils :)

Since Jason's primary involvement in distutils-sig & PyPA is as the
lead setuptools maintainer, it's easy for folks to be unaware of the
fact that he's a distutils maintainer as well.

So perhaps that's what we should adopt as the official distutils-sig
policy? Any proposed distutils changes should *always* go into
setuptools, as that way they're available for all currently supported
Python versions, and then it's up to the setuptools project to
escalate changes or change proposals for stdlib inclusion when they
consider that an appropriate step.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia