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

Vinay Sajip vinay_sajip at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Jun 23 15:14:42 CEST 2012

Antoine Pitrou <solipsis pitrou.net> writes:

Remember that distutils2 was at first distutils. It was only decided to be forked as a "new" package when some people complained. This explains a lot of the methodology. Also, forking distutils helped maintain a strong level of compatibility.

Right, but distutils was hard to extend for a reason, even though designed with extensibility in mind; hence the rise of setuptools. I understand the pragmatic nature of the design decisions in packaging, but in this case a little too much purity was sacrificed for practicality. Compatibility at a command-line level should be possible to achieve even with a quite different internal design.

Apparently people now think it's time to redesign it all. That's fine, but it won't work without a huge amount of man-hours. It's not like you can write a couple of PEPs and call it done.

Surely. But more than implementation man-hours, it requires that people are willing to devote some time and expertise in firming up the requirements, use cases etc. to go into the PEPs. It's classic chicken-and-egg; no-one wants to invest that time until they know a project's going somewhere and will have widespread backing, but the project won't go anywhere quickly unless they step up and invest the time up front.

Kudos to Tarek, Éric and others for taking this particular world on their shoulders and re-energizing the discussion and development work to date, but it seems the net needs to be spread even wider to ensure that all constituencies are represented (for example, features needed only on Windows, such as binary distributions and executable scripts, have lagged a little bit behind).

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

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