[Python-Dev] PEP 384 accepted

[Michael Foord]

On 02/12/2010 21:39, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
>> I was told not to touch to Distutils code to avoid any regression
>> since it's patched to the bones in third party products. So we decided
>> to freeze distutils and add all new features in Distutils2, which is
>> at alpha stage now.  So this move seems contradictory to me.
> I think it was a bad decision to freeze distutils, and "we" certainly
> didn't make that (not any we that includes me, that is). This freeze
> made the situation worse.

What situation worse?

"We" certainly did ask Tarek to become bdfl of distutils and fix/improve 
it (at a language summit 2 years ago). "We" then asked him to revert 
distutils and do the work in a new package instead of inside distutils 
(at the language summit this year).

I would perhaps argue for a case by case exception on PEPs that 
*required* distutils support that are being accepted and implemented 
prior to distutils2 moving into the standard library. It doesn't sound 
like your changes are *required* by the PEP though.

As I recall Tarek thought it was a bad idea to freeze distutils as well, 
but "we" insisted. :-)
> IIRC, it was really the incompatible changes that made people ask you to
> stop changing distutils.
>
Which included virtually any change to even private APIs. Given the 
issues freezing the distutils APIs except for essential bugfixes is a 
reasonable response. I don't know of any situation it has made worse. 
Things are getting very much better, but happening in distutils2 not 
distutils.

All the best,

Michael Foord

> Regards,
> Martin
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