[Python-Dev] Package install failures in 2.6.3 (original) (raw)

James Y Knight foom at fuhm.net
Mon Oct 5 22:56:16 CEST 2009

On Oct 5, 2009, at 2:21 PM, Brett Cannon wrote:

I should also mention this bug was not unknown. I discovered it after Distribute 0.6 was released as I always run cutting edge interpreters. Never bothered to report it until Distribute 0.6.1 was released which Tarek fixed in less than a week. I never bothered to report it for setuptools as I know it isn't maintained.

It's probably in our best interest to just get people over to Distribute, let it continue to hijack setuptools, and slowly let that name fade out if it is going to continue to be unmaintained. I have to admit I find it really disheartening that we are letting an unmaintained project dictate how we fix a bug. I really hope this is a one-time deal and from this point forward we all move the community towards Distribute so we never feel pressured like this again.

Even though the bug was noticed, nobody thought that, just perhaps,
breaking other software in a minor point release might be a bad idea,
no matter whether it was updated in less-than-a-week, or mostly- unmaintained?

Once you have an API that you encourage people to subclass, of
course it dictates how you can fix a bug.

James

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