[Python-Dev] setuptools in 2.5. (original) (raw)

Anthony Baxter anthony at interlink.com.au
Thu Apr 20 10:01:27 CEST 2006

On Thursday 20 April 2006 17:51, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

> He's written code on top of distutils. How is this bad?

It makes distutils an implementation detail of setuptools. What little development distutils has seen will stop; all fixes will go into setuptools directly. Users will be told that they should switch to setuptools.

Please face it: setuptools is the death of distutils.

This might not be that bad in the long run, but it does have the risk of repeating, when setuptools eventually is where distutils is today: complete, and unmaintained.

I don't see why you assume it will be unmaintained. I plan to spend some time in the near future wrapping my brain around the code - heck, I was going to do it today, but spent time writing emails instead. :-)

I also don't think it will be the "death" of distutils. I think that over time the two pieces of code will become closer together - hopefully for Python 3.0 we can formally merge the two. Augmenting or layering a more sophisticated piece of code over the top of the more simple code means that we can do more things, hopefully easier. And as people do more things, we will find the need to fix the bugs in the underlying code.

Well, I appreciate other contributions from other people, and I have always encouraged people to contribute to Python. It's just that I dislike this specific package, for several reasons, some of which I consider objective.

And you posed a number of concrete questions to PJE in the previous message, which is good - these are also some of the questions I had (but hadn't had the time to investigate yet).

Anthony

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

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