[Python-Dev] Distutils ML wrap-up: setup.cfg new format

[P.J. Eby]

At 02:20 PM 9/23/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>If you take the time to read everything you'll see that there were 
>no real alternative design proposed,

You did not respond to repeated requests (from more than one person), 
for clarification regarding the requirements that your proposal was 
trying to fill.  More than one person expressed reservations about 
the complexity of your candidate proposal, and wanted to know why we 
needed a fully conditional syntax, if the only use case for 
conditionals was expressing dependencies.

That there was not a "complete" alternative proposal is true...  but 
that's only because you would not answer the question that several 
people asked: that is, why do we *need* conditionals, for anything 
besides dependencies?  What are the use cases?

More than one person asked that question, but I never saw you answer 
it.  (In one case, you answered with the use cases for what the 
conditionals needed to be able to *check*, but not *what the 
conditionals were conditioning* -- which was the whole point of the question.)

A lack of polished alternatives to your proposal does not constitute 
a positive rationale for your own proposal, especially if people are 
asking for the rationale in order to determine whether a simpler 
proposal would suffice!

I dropped my previous competing proposal some time ago when you 
presented strong use cases for static metadata.  And I'd have happily 
dropped my support for Sridhar's proposal, too, if you'd given 
similarly strong use cases for the proposal you went with.

But even if you *didn't* give those use cases, I'd have been fine 
with you saying to Python-Dev, "I got tired of the discussion and 
chose to Pronounce."  (After all, that is what you more or less said 
on the distutils-sig.)

But what hacked me off is that *here*, you presented your 
pronouncement as if it were a summary of distutils-sig discussion, 
when the last flurry of traffic on the distutils-sig right beforehand 
was a bunch of questions and requests for use cases.  Not nice.