[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[Paul Moore]

2009/7/8 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> If it were being driven by setuptools, I'd have just implemented it myself
> and presented it as a fait accompli.  I can't speak to Tarek's motives, but
> I assume that, as stated in the PEP, the primary driver is supporting the
> distutils being able to uninstall things, and secondarily to allow other
> tools to be built on top of the API.

My understanding is that all of the various distutils PEPs were driven
by the "packaging summit" ay PyCon. The struggle here seems to be to
find *anyone* from that summit who will now comment on the discussion
:-(

>> a packaging tool *other* than setuptools (or setuptools-derived projects)
>
> Is there really such a thing?  ;-)

I wonder... :-)

> AFAIK, every published tool for managing Python projects is either
> distutils-based or setuptools-based.  (Things like scons and pymake and
> various other project build tools don't seem to fall under "packaging tool"
> in this sense.)

The big driver seems to be things that take distutils packages and
build Linux packages (debs, rpms, ...) from them. Unfortunately, I
know nothing about these tools, and no-one seems to be speaking up on
the subject.

Maybe this was all thrashed out on the distutils SIG, and consensus
reached there (I only skim that list). If so, maybe this list is the
wrong one to be discussing changes to the PEP on.

Paul.