[Python-Dev] Raising objections

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Wed Apr 19 19:46:22 CEST 2006


Greg Ewing wrote:
>> I started refactoring some of the ugliness out of the internals of 
>> distutils last year, but was completely stymied by the demand that no 
>> existing setup.py scripts be broken.
> 
> Instead of trying to fix distutils, maybe it would be better
> to start afresh with a new package and a new name, then
> there wouldn't be any backwards-compatibility issues to
> hold it back.

It is *precisely* my concern that this happens. For whatever reason,
writing packaging-and-deployment software is totally unsexy. This is
why setuptools is a one-man show, and this is why the original distutils
authors ran away after they convinced everybody that distutils should
be part of Python. If distutils is now abandoned and replaced with
something else, the same story will happen again: the developers will
run away, the package gets abandoned, and, after a few years of sadness,
a new, smart developer will come along and provide a super replacement.
And that will repeat in cycles of roughly 10 years.

We have to stop this. If distutils has flaws, fix them. Never ever
even think about rewriting software:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Regards,
Martin


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