[issue41282] Deprecate and remove distutils

[Paul Ganssle]

Paul Ganssle <p.ganssle at gmail.com> added the comment:

> I don't think it's a good idea to replace bad habits from distutils with bad habits in setuptools._distutils.  And this is exactly what you get with pointing directly to setuptools.

These are two different questions. We're not asking people to migrate to `setuptools._distutils` (a private module which may not continue to exist in that location), `setuptools` is *adopting* `distutils`, such that `distutils` is a project provided by `pip install distutils` (mind you, this is happening independent of what the standard library does — the only question is whether `import distutils` continues to work if you don't have `setuptools` installed).

> While splitting out distutils to a separate package in a Linux distro, I found some creative usages at runtime of a package (see my lightning talk at the language summit 2018, and [1]).  From my point of view, CPython should provide documentation how to forward-port these issues without using setuptools._distutils.

At this point, the extent of CPython's documentation on this should probably be, "We are removing `distutils` and moving it into the `setuptools` namespace. In future versions, you will need to install `setuptools` to import the `distutils` package." `setuptools` should almost certainly deprecate `distutils` and probably remove large swathes of it in the process, but that's probably on a case-by-case basis, and it's a separate issue from what needs to happen in CPython.

> Currently setuptools only has one component (pkg_resources, [2]) which is used at runtime.  I dislike it if more than that is used at runtime of a package.

I don't think anyone is planning to recommend the use of *any* `setuptools`-provided packages at runtime, including `pkg_resources`. This move is actually a good one from that point of view, because it will require that projects using `distutils` declare a *runtime* dependency on `setuptools`, which will, hopefully, raise some eyebrows. Better than the current situation, where these dependencies are totally undeclared (though probably worse than if `setuptools`, `pkg_resources` and `distutils` were all separate PyPI packages).

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue41282>
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