[Python-Dev] setuptools in 2.5. (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Thu Apr 20 09:51:13 CEST 2006

Anthony Baxter wrote:

Not without a lot of the other stuff that's in setuptools.

That is says from itself that it is version 0.7a1dev-r45536 doesn't help to reduce that fear. It's had two years of quite active development, so the version number of 0.7 is hardly a good indication. As far as all the other stuff on the end of the version string - well, right now Python's SVN trunk really could be considered 2.5a2dev-r45575.

Right - I'm not concerned about the "a1dev-r45536" part. The 0.7 part bothers me; this is two years of development from a single person, still. I have projects that are much older than that that I wouldn't suggest for inclusion in Python :-)

Requiring Phillip to rewrite distutils instead is certainly unfair - but I'm still unhappy with the path events take. He's written code on top of distutils. How is this bad?

It makes distutils an implementation detail of setuptools. What little development distutils has seen will stop; all fixes will go into setuptools directly. Users will be told that they should switch to setuptools.

Please face it: setuptools is the death of distutils.

This might not be that bad in the long run, but it does have the risk of repeating, when setuptools eventually is where distutils is today: complete, and unmaintained.

See, I don't get the hostility thing. While I have some concerns about the state of distutils today, I still admire Greg Ward's efforts in producing the code, and Python is in a much better place than had he not done the work. Responding to an effort like Greg's, or Phillip's, with hostility is a fantastic way to discourage people from working further on Python or on the code in question.

Well, I appreciate other contributions from other people, and I have always encouraged people to contribute to Python. It's just that I dislike this specific package, for several reasons, some of which I consider objective.

Regards, Martin

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