[Python-Dev] [Distutils] [Catalog-sig] accept the wheel PEPs425, 426, 427

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 13 Nov, 2012, at 18:32, Martin v. Löwis <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:

> Am 13.11.12 17:45, schrieb Maciej Fijalkowski:
>> For example distutils is absolutely *untestable* which makes it very
>> far from good enough for me.
> 
> I never had issues with testing distutils applications. I use
> "python setup.py sdist", then unpack the resulting source package,
> install it, and run its test - if that passes, the packaging was
> successful.

I'm pretty sure he means testing distutils itself.  

I'm not convinced that distutils is untestable. A major problem with
distutils is that its API is barely documented, which effectly makes
all of it public API (simular to asyncore).  IIRC that's the main reason
why distutils is frozen right now: with a lot of changes to distutils people
started to complain that this could break there there distutils scripts.

The lack of a specification also makes testing harder, as it is unclear
what should be tested.

Ronald