[Python-Dev] BDFL delegation for PEP 426 (PyPI metadata 1.3)

[David Cournapeau]

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 10:34 PM, Vinay Sajip <vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Simon Cross <hodgestar+pythondev <at> gmail.com> writes:
>
>> For the record, all the reasons listed at [1] appear trivial.
>
> In Bento's author's own words - "Weak documentation", "Mediocre code quality",
> "at a lower level, a lot of code leaves to be desired" may be trivial if David
> is just being self-deprecating, but what if he isn't? Or perhaps that part of
> the page is out of date, and needs updating? I can certainly agree with the
> "Weak documentation" part of the assessment, but this makes it hard to assess
> the package as a whole. Note that I'm not sniping - writing good documentation
> is hard work.

You are putting the words out of the context in which those were
written: it is stated that the focus is on the general architecture
and low-coupling which are the main issues I saw with distutils. Bento
is designed to use multiple build backends (it can use distutils to
build C extensions, or waf, the latter being how numpy/scipy is being
built with bento).

FWIW, I am not in favor of having bento blessed (or any other tool for
that matter). The fundamental mistake of the previous attempts at
packaging has been to formalize too early, or impose de-facto
standards without much specification. That's why wheel and similar
efforts are the way forward: they tackle a narrow but well defined
sub-problem of packaging. Thus, they can be reused by other libraries
to build higher abstractions. They are also less prone to the
'fatigue' that often arise in packaging efforts.

David