[Python-Dev] Distutils frozen?

[Victor Stinner]

2017-03-27 19:32 GMT+02:00 Ryan Gonzalez <rymg19 at gmail.com>:
> Then I found bpo-11913 (https://bugs.python.org/issue11913), which said:
>
> This would be easy to fix, but as it would be considered a new feature, it
> can’t go into distutils, which is frozen.

Oh, that painful story. There was a huge "distutils2 project" which
failed for some reasons. While distutils2 was developed, it was
decided to revert recent changes in distutils to prevent *any kind* of
regression and block further changes.

But that was in 2011. Today, pip is very popular, released often, take
care on backward compatibility on top of setuptools and distutils.
Hopefully, parts of distutils2 became distlib which is now a core
library of pip.

Victor