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

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Apr 20 04:04:39 CEST 2006

At 10:39 AM 4/20/2006 +1000, Anthony Baxter wrote:

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?

I don't know how widely the distutils were used before they became a part of Python, so it's possible the authors didn't know what they were in for. Of course, it's still possible that I don't know what I'm in for either. However, the amount of work I've been putting in wouldn't be possible without OSAF's indirect finanical support for the project.

But, setuptools solves problems that commercial entities are often interested in solving. The Envisage folks inquired at Pycon about me possibly helping expand setuptools' scope to building and installing C dynamic link libraries, and this is also a feature potentially desired for Chandler's build system as well.

What this means is that there is a potential basis for supporting the work going forward, at least through what I'm hoping will be the "1.0" version. And I suspect that there are other improvements possible that other commercial entities would be interested in funding.

How much any of that could have also applied to the distutils at one time, I don't know. My point is merely that setuptools has enough commercial value to make me believe that sponsorship for features shouldn't be that hard to come by, and there are certainly worse things I could do with my work days.

This shouldn't be construed as saying I'll only work on setuptools if paid; it merely means that the huge gobs of time I've been putting into it at times are only possible because it aligns with OSAF goals enough to let me put a substantial chunk of my work days and nights into it.

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.

You know, after my experience doing setuptools, I'm a lot less inclined to criticize anybody's code, if it works and solves a problem. Sometimes, the structure of the problems are just not amenable to beautiful solutions. Or more to the point, beautiful solutions are not always economical to implement while you're supporting actual users and backwards compatibility is a constant requirement. So my attitude to the distutils code has mellowed considerably; I view it as a collection of things that I at least don't have to think about. C compilers, for example, are something I don't have to touch at all, except for some recent experiments in implementing shared library building.

So, I don't really view the distutils as broken per se; it's just that they lack a lot of desirable features that are hard to implement without breaking backward compatibility. That's not quite the same thing as "the code sucks and we should rewrite it". There have been a lot of calls to scrap it and rewrite it throughout the years I've been working on setuptools, but I can't imagine who could possibly afford such an undertaking (as opposed to talking about it).

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.

Well, the analogy isn't great anyway, because setuptools is hardly a rewrite of the distutils. I didn't rewrite a single thing I could get away with calling or subclassing. Setuptools is all about adding new features, not "cleaning up" the distutils code base, so arguing about whether rewrites are good or not is a straw man holding a red herring. :)

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