[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:46 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> Agreed, especially if the "proven in the wild" criterion is required
> (people won't rush to another third-party distutils replacement, IMHO).

The existence of setuptools means that "proven in the wild" is never
going to fly - a whole lot of people use setuptools and easy_install
happily, because they just don't care about the downsides it has in
terms of loss of control of a system configuration.

> I cannot speak for Tarek, but one of the reasons it's been done as a
> set of smaller PEPs is that these PEPs were meant to be included in
> *distutils*, not distutils2. That is, the module already existed and
> the PEPs were individual, incremental improvements.

That initial set of PEPs were also aimed at defining interoperability
standards that multiple projects could implement independently, even
*without* support in the standard library.

As I wrote in my other email, I think one key aspect of where we went
wrong after that point was in never clearly spelling out just what we
collectively meant by "fix packaging". Most of the burden of
interpreting that phrase thus landed directly on the shoulders of the
distutils2 project lead.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia