[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[Vinay Sajip]

Antoine Pitrou <solipsis <at> pitrou.net> writes:

> Remember that distutils2 was at first distutils. It was only decided to
> be forked as a "new" package when some people complained.
> This explains a lot of the methodology. Also, forking distutils helped
> maintain a strong level of compatibility.

Right, but distutils was hard to extend for a reason, even though designed with
extensibility in mind; hence the rise of setuptools. I understand the pragmatic
nature of the design decisions in packaging, but in this case a little too much
purity was sacrificed for practicality. Compatibility at a command-line level
should be possible to achieve even with a quite different internal design.
 
> Apparently people now think it's time to redesign it all. That's fine,
> but it won't work without a huge amount of man-hours. It's not like you
> can write a couple of PEPs and call it done.

Surely. But more than implementation man-hours, it requires that people are
willing to devote some time and expertise in firming up the requirements, use
cases etc. to go into the PEPs. It's classic chicken-and-egg; no-one wants to
invest that time until they know a project's going somewhere and will have
widespread backing, but the project won't go anywhere quickly unless they step
up and invest the time up front.

Kudos to Tarek, Éric and others for taking this particular world on their
shoulders and re-energizing the discussion and development work to date, but it
seems the net needs to be spread even wider to ensure that all constituencies
are represented (for example, features needed only on Windows, such as binary
distributions and executable scripts, have lagged a little bit behind).

Regards,

Vinay Sajip