[meta-sig] Proposed charter: distutils-sig

[Greg Ward]

distutils-sig: forum to discuss module distribution utilities for Python

The distutils sig is proposed to discuss the design and implementation
of a suite of module distribution utilities for Python.  These utilities
will take the form of some standard modules, probably grouped in the
'distutils' package, for building, packaging, and installing third-party
modules.  This includes both modules written purely in Python and
extension modules written in C/C++.

The main deliverable will be the following core modules (in the
distutils package):
   build    - provides code for building a module, which might include
              copying .py files into a staging area, compiling and linking
              .c files, processing documentation to an installable form,
              etc.
   dist     - create a source distribution
   bdist    - create a 'built distribution' (the equivalent of a 'binary
              distribution', except that binaries won't necessarily
              be present
   install  - install a built library on the local machine
   gen_make - generate a Makefile to do some of the above tasks
              (mainly 'build', for developer convenience and efficiency)

I will tentatively put forward March 1999 as a target for a working
release to run on top of Python 1.5.2, which *might* require a
patch-and-rebuild-Python step (or might find ways to work with the
information available under 1.5).  For a complete, tested, documented
suite ready to bundle with Python 1.6, let's shoot for June 1999.

Other topics of interest:
  * encouraging module developers to write test suites by having
    a standard place for them in module distributions
  * ditto for documentation -- although this is probably the job of
    the doc-sig, it would be nice to tie the two together at some point
  * a standard for representing and comparing version numbers
  * social engineering in general, ie. convincing module developers
    to start using the system
  * the possible need for tweaks to the configure/build process for
    Python itself, and a place to hold configuration
    information (possibly a new built-in module, 'sys.config')
  * possibly rewriting the configure/build/install process for
    Python 1.6 -- especially useful if the distutils are bundled
    with 1.6!
  * ties to Trove -- any module distribution scheme must include
    a way to describe the package metadata, and there will need
    to be hooks between any future Trove archive for Python and
    this metadata

The starting point for discussion on the sig will be the summary of the
IPC7 Developer's Day session which got this whole thing rolling:

   http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/dd-ward-sum.html