[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 11:22:07 +0200
Tarek Ziadé <tarek at ziade.org> wrote:
> I tried to improve Distutils and I was stopped and told to start 
> distutils2, because
> distutils is so rotten, any *real* change/improvment potentially brakes 
> the outside world.

If distutils was so rotten, distutils2 would not reuse much of its
structure and concepts (and test suite), would it?

Most of the distutils2 improvements (new PEPs, setup.cfg, etc.) were
totally possible in distutils, weren't they?

> > Deciding to remove packaging from 3.3 is another instance of the same
> > mistake, IMO.
> So what are your suggesting, since you seem to know what's a mistake and 
> what's not ?

I don't have any suggestion apart from keeping packaging in 3.3.

But I also think it would be better for the community if people were
not delusional when making decisions. Removing packaging from 3.3 is a
big risk: users and potential contributors will be even less interested
than they already are.

Here's a datapoint: distribute (*) is downloaded 100x more times than
distutils2 (**).

(*) http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute/
(**) http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Distutils2/

Regards

Antoine.