[Python-Dev] PEP 376 - Open questions

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 7:07 AM, Eric Smith<eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> Paul Moore wrote:
>>
>> 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
>> :-(
>
> I was there, and I've been commenting!
>
> There might have been more discussion after the language summit and the one
> open space event I went to. But the focus as I recall was static metadata
> and version specification. When I originally brought up static metadata at
> the summit, I meant metadata describing the sources in the distribution, so
> that we can get rid of setup.py's. From that metadata, I want to be able to
> generate .debs, .rpms, .eggs, etc.

I agree wholeheartedly. Getting rid of setup.py for most packages
should be a goal IMHO. Most packages don't need anything fancy, and
static metadata are so much easier to use compared to
setup.py/distutils for 3rd party interop.

There was a discussion about how to describe/find the list of files to
form a distribution (for the different sdist/bdist_* commands), but no
agreement was reached. Some people strongly defend the setuptools
feature to get the list of files from the source control system, in
particular.

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2009-April/011226.html

David