[Python-Dev] "setuptools has divided the Python community"

[Guido van Rossum]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 8:02 AM, Eric Smith <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>>
>> On 2009-03-27 04:19, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>>
>>> - keep distutils, but start deprecating certain higher-level
>>> functionality in it (e.g. bdist_rpm)
>>> - don't try to provide higher-level functionality in the stdlib, but
>>> instead let third party tools built on top of these core APIs compete
>>
>> Should this be read as:
>>
>> - remove bdist_rpm from the stdlib and let it live on PyPI
>>
>> ?
>
> As one of the people who proposed this, I think it means: move bdist_rpm,
> bdist_msi, etc. out of distutils, but provide some of them with the standard
> Python installation. I'm certain that as part of the refactoring and
> simplification of distutils we'll gradually move the existing bdist_*
> commands into separate, stand-alone "things" (scripts, callable modules, or
> something). We'll need to do this if only for testing, so we may as well
> make them work.

One of the motivations for deprecating this (and for using this
specific example) was that Matthias Klose, the Python packager for
Debian, said he never uses bdist_rpm.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)