[Python-Dev] API for the new sysconfig module

[Barry Warsaw]

On Dec 12, 2010, at 02:42 PM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:

>On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 13:01:42 +0100
>Łukasz Langa <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:
>
>> Wiadomość napisana przez Raymond Hettinger w dniu 2010-12-11, o godz. 22:18:
>> 
>> >> *(I sometimes lose track of which changes were made in both branches
>> >> pre-2.7, which ones were mode post-2.7 release, and which ones went in
>> >> pre-2.7, but were 3.x only regardless)
>> > 
>> > Right.  I missed that it was already in 2.7.
>> > So, now we're stuck with it, forever.
>> 
>> Why not deprecate it for 3.2 (easy since it's probably not yet used anywhere anyway, even in 2.7) and introduce sys.sysconfig.
>
>We already had a lot of churn around these APIs (distutils & friends). I
>don't think it's a good idea to introduce even more churn.
>Oh and by the way it's too late to add or remove features from 3.2.
>
>> I really like that much better than Java-like accessor functions.
>
>Do you actually use sysconfig yourself? It's quite a specialized
>module, and I don't think API elegance arguments have a great weight
>here.

I have used them and I do think they're fairly ugly and unwieldy.  However, I
agree that we should not rush into a different design.  Since sysconfig was
essentially refactored out of distutils (and now we have two ways to do it!),
and we're getting distutils2 for 3.3, I think it would be better to work out a
more natural design for sysconfig for 3.3.  Then the sysconfig module can go
through the natural deprecation cycle.

-Barry

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