[Python-3000] Proposal: No more standard library additions

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Ronald Oussoren schrieb:
>> And indeed, distutils already has support for that:
>> distutils.dep_util offers a couple of routines that
>> do time-stamp checking.
> 
> This points to at least part of the problem: there is very little useful
> documentation on how to extend, or even use, distutils.

Thats certainly the case, and indeed a problem (I readily
admit there are many problems with distutils). These problems
can only be fixed through people contributing documentation,
though. This *specific* problem certainly cannot be resolved
by replacing the package with something else, unless that
something else has already excellent documentation to start
with (which it likely doesn't).

I believe that the whole issue of packaging and deployment
is indeed one of the biggest challenges in IT engineering,
so it is no surprise that the technology attempting to deal
with it is complex, incomplete, and non-intuitive. And that
statement is IMO not only true about distutils, but also
about its direct competitors, and about the more-remote
relatives (such as dpkg, rpm, msi, OSX packages, ...)

Regards,
Martin