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

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Thu Dec 2 23:17:05 CET 2010

This freeze made the situation worse. Can you extend on this and explains why it makes it worse ?

Before the freeze, distutils was unmaintained (i.e. before you started maintaining it), but people who want to improve it gradually atleast could. Now gradual improvements are also banned, so it's not only unmaintained, but I can't even provide support for the PEP in Python that was just accepted.

IIRC, it was really the incompatible changes that made people ask you to stop changing distutils. Who is "people" ? Are you suggesting that we could have added all the new features in Distutils in the stdlib ?

No, only the ones that didn't cause backwards incompatibilities, and broke existing packages.

But that's what you would expect for a project that needs to evolve a lot. Thus the freezing.

Instead of evolving a lot, and instead of freezing, I would have preferred "evolve a little".

So how would you make the situation better, if not by doing the work in distutils2 ?

Lift the freeze. I'm all for replacing distutils with distutils2, but I'm not sure whether you will declare distutils2 ready tomorrow, next year, or ten years from now.

Regards, Martin

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