[Python-Dev] Raising objections (original) (raw)

Anthony Baxter anthony at interlink.com.au
Thu Apr 20 02:39:22 CEST 2006

On Thursday 20 April 2006 03:46, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

It is precisely my concern that this happens. For whatever reason, writing packaging-and-deployment software is totally unsexy. This is why setuptools is a one-man show, and this is why the original distutils authors ran away after they convinced everybody that distutils should be part of Python. If distutils is now abandoned and replaced with something else, the same story will happen again: the developers will run away,

Well, I've seen no indication that this is Phillip's plan. If it is, could he tell us now?

the package gets abandoned, and, after a few years of sadness, a new, smart developer will come along and provide a super replacement. And that will repeat in cycles of roughly 10 years.

Well, I'm planning on trying to get across the setuptools codebase before 2.5 final.

We have to stop this. If distutils has flaws, fix them. Never ever even think about rewriting software:

I started looking at this. The number of complaints I got when I started on this that it would break the existing distutils based installers totally discouraged me. In addition, the existing distutils codebase is ... not good.

It is flatly not possible to "fix" distutils and preserve backwards compatibility. Sometimes you have to rewrite. I point to urllib->urllib2, asyncore->twisted, rfc822/mimelib/&c->email. This approach means that people's existing code continues to work, there's a separate installer of the new code that is available for older versions of Python, plus we have the newer features.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Yes. I remember that piece. In particular, he wrote the original rant about this about Mozilla/Firefox. How did that work out again? Oh, that's right - we now have a much, much more successful and usable browser.

Anthony

Anthony Baxter <anthony at interlink.com.au> It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

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