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

Dag Sverre Seljebotn d.s.seljebotn at astro.uio.no
Sat Jun 23 13:13:23 CEST 2012

On 06/23/2012 12:37 PM, Lennart Regebro wrote:

Why do I get the feeling that most people who hate distutils and want to replace it, has transferred those feelings to distutils2/packaging, mainly because of the name?

In the end, I think this discussion is very similar to all previous packaging/building/installing discussions: There is a lot of emotions, and a lot of willingness to declare that "X sucks" but very little concrete explanation of why X sucks and why it can't be fixed.

I think David has been pretty concrete in a lot of his criticism too (though he has refrained from repeating himself too much in this thread). Some of the criticism is spelled out here:

http://bento.readthedocs.org/en/latest/faq.html

This blog post is even more concrete (but perhaps outdated?):

http://cournape.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/271/

As for me, I believe I've been rather blunt and direct in my criticism in this thread: It's been said by Tarek that distutils2 authors that they don't know anything about compilers. Therefore it's almost unconceivable to me that much good can come from distutils2 for my needs. Even if packaging and building isn't the same, the two issues do tangle at a fundamental level, and most existing solutions already out there (RPM, MSI..) distribute compiled software and therefore one needs a solid understanding of build processes to also understand these tools fully and draw on their experiences and avoid reinventing the wheel.

Somebody with a deep understanding of 3-4 existing build systems and long experience in cross-platform builds and cross-architecture builds would need to be on board for me to take it seriously (even the packaging parts). As per Tarek's comments, I'm therefore pessimistic about the distutils2 efforts.

(You can always tell me that I shouldn't criticise unless I'm willing to join and do something about it. That's fair. I'm just saying that my unwillingness to cheer for distutils2 is NOT based on the name only!)

Dag

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