[Python-Dev] setuptools in the stdlib (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Wed Apr 19 02:53:53 CEST 2006

At 02:12 AM 4/19/2006 +0200, Giovanni Bajo wrote:

But, why can't setuptools be gradually merged into distutils, instead of being kept as a separate package? Let's take a real example: setuptools' sdist is much enhanced, has integration with CVS/SVN, uses MANIFEST in a way that it really works, etc. Why can't it be merged into the original distutils? Is it just for backward compatibility?

This specific issue was discussed last year on the distutils-sig, and the issue is indeed one of compatibility. Setuptools' behavior for MANIFEST generation definitely matches new or infrequent users' expectations 1000% better than the distutils, and requires much less work to get right, even for experts.

But for anybody who has extended the distutils using external tools, it would not necessarily work. MAL gave the example of someone who has written other scripts or Makefile rules to add things to MANIFEST or use it to do other things. They might be relying on quirks of the existing behaviors, in other words, and thus it should not be changed without explicit action on their part.

And I agree with his reasoning, although I also think that any "distutils 2" should have only One Obvious Way to send input to that process, and it should be via MANIFEST.in, not MANIFEST. Likewise, it should have only one way to get the output.

However, unless somebody explicitly chooses to use "distutils 2", they should get the old behavior. This unfortunately means that we can't backport most of setuptools' enhancements to the existing distutils without breaking backward compatibility for people who may have made extensive investment in integrating with the distutils.

(Of course, how many of these people exist I don't know; in my personal experience it seems rare for people to integrate with external tools in this fashion, versus simply subclassing things in Python or abandoning distutils altogether. But that's a separate question.)

If so, can't we have some kind of versioning system?

We do: "import setuptools". We could perhaps rename it to "import distutils2" if you prefer, but it would mean essentially the same thing. :)

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list