[Python-Dev] PEP 384 accepted (original) (raw)

Michael Foord fuzzyman at voidspace.org.uk
Thu Dec 2 22:54:54 CET 2010

On 02/12/2010 21:39, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:

I was told not to touch to Distutils code to avoid any regression since it's patched to the bones in third party products. So we decided to freeze distutils and add all new features in Distutils2, which is at alpha stage now. So this move seems contradictory to me. I think it was a bad decision to freeze distutils, and "we" certainly didn't make that (not any we that includes me, that is). This freeze made the situation worse.

What situation worse?

"We" certainly did ask Tarek to become bdfl of distutils and fix/improve it (at a language summit 2 years ago). "We" then asked him to revert distutils and do the work in a new package instead of inside distutils (at the language summit this year).

I would perhaps argue for a case by case exception on PEPs that required distutils support that are being accepted and implemented prior to distutils2 moving into the standard library. It doesn't sound like your changes are required by the PEP though.

As I recall Tarek thought it was a bad idea to freeze distutils as well, but "we" insisted. :-)

IIRC, it was really the incompatible changes that made people ask you to stop changing distutils. Which included virtually any change to even private APIs. Given the issues freezing the distutils APIs except for essential bugfixes is a reasonable response. I don't know of any situation it has made worse. Things are getting very much better, but happening in distutils2 not distutils.

All the best,

Michael Foord

Regards, Martin

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