[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3 (original) (raw)

Victor Stinner victor.stinner at gmail.com
Wed Jun 20 08:36:42 CEST 2012

What is the status of the third party module on PyPI (distutils2)? Does it contain all fixes done in the packaging module? Does it have exactly the same API? Does it support Python 2.5 to 3.3, or maybe also 2.4?

How is the distutils2 module installed? Installed manually? Using pip or setuptools? Is distutils2 included in some Linux distributions?

If it's simple to install distutils2, it's not a big deal to not have it in the stdlib.

--

It is sometimes a pain to have a buggy module in Python. For example, I got a lot of issues with the subprocess module of Python 2.5. I started to include a copy of the subprocess module from Python 2.7 in my projects to workaround these issues.

In my previous work we did also backport various modules to get the last version of the xmlrpc client on Python 2.5 (especially for HTTP/1.1, to not open a new TCP socket at each request).

I don't want to reopen the discussion "the stdlib should be an external project". I just want to confirm that it is better to wait until important users of the packaging API have finished their work (on porting their project to distutils2, especially pip), before we can declare the module (and its API) as stable.

By the way, what is the status of "pip using distutils2"?

Victor

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