[Python-Dev] need info for externally maintained modules PEP (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Apr 9 21:00:05 CEST 2006

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

I was hoping that we had reached a point where setup.py could simply become the One Obvious Way to do it, in which case the One Obvious Way to bundle formerly-external libraries would be to bundle their setup scripts.

Well, setup.py cannot (yet?) replace the other mechanisms. It is certainly the default, yes.

Of course it can, and that will certainly solve the issues for packages with dependencies on ctypes, ElementTree, and setuptools. But I was hoping for a more modular approach, one that would be more amenable to the needs of external library maintainers, and of system packagers who split even the core stdlib into multiple packages. Those packagers will have to figure out what parts of the new setup.py to extract and what to keep in order to do their splitting. And the people who develop the libraries will have to maintain two unrelated setup.py files.

I can't envision how that would work, or what problems it would solve. Hence, I personally can't work on any of this.

System packagers already have mechanisms for splitting the Python distribution into several packages. They typically run the entire build process, building all modules, and then put the various files into different packages. I don't think they have ever asked for better support of this process, and I doubt that additional setup.py will help them - they just apply the process that the where using all the time to the new release, and it will continue to work fine.

Regards, Martin

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