[Python-Dev] no remaining issues blocking 2.5 release (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Wed Aug 16 00:55:45 CEST 2006

Martin v. Löwis wrote:

M.-A. Lemburg schrieb:

It's either an official feature, with somebody maintaining it, or people should expect to break it anytime. I'll let you know when things break - is that good enough ? That can't be an official policy; you seem to define "breaks" as "breaks in my (your) personal usage of distutils". While this is fine as an end-user point of view, it isn't useful as a maintenance guideline.

It's all I can offer.

We do use quite a few distutils features and also extend it in various ways, so I suppose that our build system covers quite a bit of what distutils has to offer. Think of it as a test-bot that runs a real-life test on the distutils code.

In case you don't see what I mean: I said that something is already broken (bdistmsi), where "broken" means "doesn't work", and you said "it's only a small part". So if it's fine that only small parts break, I wonder where this gets us over time.

distutils is composed of many components. bdist_msi is one of them. Because it's new it can hardly "break" distutils in any way because it's a feature that didn't exist in the distutils version shipped with Python prior to 2.5.

As a result, that distribution format cannot be used with older Python versions, but the rest of distutils continues to work as usual.

I wouldn't call that breakage of distutils. It's just a feature that has external requirements, much like you can't run bdist_rpm without having the RPM tool installed.

In general, if you have to rely on new features in Python such as extension modules which are not available in older Python versions, then that's fine - but again, if not really necessary, I'd rather see an approach being used that also works with older Python versions.

What I do consider breakage, is if you use Python 2.5 features just to beef up some part of distutils core code.

For another example, you found that 2.1 compatibility is now broken (due to usage of True and False). When distutils was still listed in PEP 291, 2.1 compatibility was mentioned as a goal. Now, it doesn't seem to bother you very much that 2.1 compatibility is gone.

Actually, it does bother me, but I understand that not many people use Python 2.1 anymore, so don't insist keeping that version requirement.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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