[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3 (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Wed Jun 20 15:02:25 CEST 2012

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 9:46 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

Agreed, especially if the "proven in the wild" criterion is required (people won't rush to another third-party distutils replacement, IMHO).

The existence of setuptools means that "proven in the wild" is never going to fly - a whole lot of people use setuptools and easy_install happily, because they just don't care about the downsides it has in terms of loss of control of a system configuration.

I cannot speak for Tarek, but one of the reasons it's been done as a set of smaller PEPs is that these PEPs were meant to be included in distutils, not distutils2. That is, the module already existed and the PEPs were individual, incremental improvements.

That initial set of PEPs were also aimed at defining interoperability standards that multiple projects could implement independently, even without support in the standard library.

As I wrote in my other email, I think one key aspect of where we went wrong after that point was in never clearly spelling out just what we collectively meant by "fix packaging". Most of the burden of interpreting that phrase thus landed directly on the shoulders of the distutils2 project lead.

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list