[Python-Dev] PEP 376 and PEP 302 - allowing import hooks to provide distribution metadata

[Paul Moore]

2009/7/7 Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au>:
>> - PEP 376 is an opportunity to consider cleanup
>> - there are some strong supporters of keeping things
>> setuptools-compatible
>
> Your implication seems to be that these two are incompatible. It should
> be noted that it's possible to clean up, by having a separate (e.g.
> ‘.pydist’) directory as the new standard, with “cleaned up” standard
> content, and continue backward compatibility in the actual tools while
> deprecating the old ‘.egg-info’ format for some time until finally
> removing that support.

Phillip argued strongly against this. I'm not going to repeat his
arguments - they seemed to make sense to me at the time, but I haven't
internalised them well enough that I'd be willing to try to repeat
them here.

The crux of all this seems to be setuptools' backwards compatibility
issues, As someone who has a very strong dislike of setuptools (the
implementation, not the ideas), I'm trying very, very hard to leave it
to someone else to say "stuff setuptools, this is a core distutils
proposal, setuptools can keep up or die" :-)

Paul.