[Python-Dev] setuptools in 2.5.

Anthony Baxter anthony at interlink.com.au
Thu Apr 20 10:01:27 CEST 2006


On Thursday 20 April 2006 17:51, Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> > He's written code on _top_ _of_ _distutils_. How is this bad?
>
> It makes distutils an implementation detail of setuptools. What
> little development distutils has seen will stop; all fixes will
> go into setuptools directly. Users will be told that they should
> switch to setuptools.

> Please face it: setuptools *is* the death of distutils.

> This might not be that bad in the long run, but it does have
> the risk of repeating, when setuptools eventually is where
> distutils is today: complete, and unmaintained.

I don't see why you assume it will be unmaintained. I plan to spend 
some time in the near future wrapping my brain around the code - 
heck, I was going to do it today, but spent time writing emails 
instead. :-)

I also don't think it will be the "death" of distutils. I think that 
over time the two pieces of code will become closer together - 
hopefully for Python 3.0 we can formally merge the two. Augmenting or 
layering a more sophisticated piece of code over the top of the more 
simple code means that we can do more things, hopefully easier. And 
as people do more things, we will find the need to fix the bugs in 
the underlying code. 

> Well, I appreciate other contributions from other people, and I
> have always encouraged people to contribute to Python. It's just
> that I dislike this *specific* package, for several reasons, some
> of which I consider objective.

And you posed a number of concrete questions to PJE in the previous 
message, which is good - these are also some of the questions I had 
(but hadn't had the time to investigate yet). 

Anthony
-- 
Anthony Baxter     <anthony at interlink.com.au>
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.


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