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

Dag Sverre Seljebotn d.s.seljebotn at astro.uio.no
Sat Jun 23 15:37:32 CEST 2012

On 06/23/2012 03:20 PM, Vinay Sajip wrote:

Dag Sverre Seljebotn<d.s.seljebotn astro.uio.no> writes:

Of course you can always do anything, as numpy.distutils is a living proof of. Question is if it is good design. Can I be confident that the hooks are well-designed for my purposes? Only you can look at the design to determine that.

But the point is I can't! I don't trust myself to do that.

I've many times wasted days and weeks on starting to use tools that looked quite nice to me, but suddenly I get bit by needing to do something turns out to be almost impossible to do cleanly due to design constraints.

That's why it's so import to me to rely on experts that have more experience than I do (such as David).

(That's of course also why it's so important to copy designs from what works elsewhere. And have a really deep knowledge of those designs and their rationale.)

On 06/23/2012 02:27 PM, Vinay Sajip wrote:

This deep understanding is not essential in the packaging/distutil2 team, AFAICT. They just need to make sure that the hook APIs are sufficiently flexible, that the hooks invoked at the appropriate time, and that they are adequately documented with appropriate examples.

All I'm doing is expressing my doubts that "making the hook API sufficiently flexible" and "invoked at the appropriate time" (and I'll add "has the right form") can be achieved at all without having subject expertise covering all the relevant usecases.

Of course I can't mathematically prove this, it's just my experience as a software developer.

Dag

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