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

PJ Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Thu Jun 21 19:49:02 CEST 2012

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Tarek Ziadé <tarek at ziade.org> wrote:

telling us no one that is willing to maintain setuptools is able to do so. (according to him)

Perhaps there is some confusion or language barrier here: what I said at that time was that the only people who I already knew to be capable of taking on full responsibility for continued development of setuptools, were not available/interested in the job, to my knowledge.

Specifically, the main people I had in mind were Ian Bicking and/or Jim Fulton, both of whom had developed extensions to or significant chunks of setuptools' functionality themselves, during which they demonstrated exemplary levels of understanding both of the code base and the wide variety of scenarios in which that code base had to operate. They also both demonstrated conservative, user-oriented design choices, that made me feel comfortable that they would not do anything to disrupt the existing user base, and that if they made any compatibility-breaking changes, they would do so in a way that avoided disruption. (I believe I also gave Philip Jenvey as an example of someone who, while not yet proven at that level, was someone I considered a good potential candidate as well.)

This was not a commentary on anyone else's ability, only on my then-present knowledge of clearly-suitable persons and their availability, or lack thereof.

I would guess that the pool of qualified persons is even larger now, but the point is moot: my issue was never about who would "maintain" setuptools, but who would develop it.

And I expect that we would at this point agree that future development of setuptools is not something either of us are seeking. Rather, we should be seeking to develop tools that can properly supersede it.

This is why I participated in Distutils-SIG discussion of the various packaging PEPs, and hope to see more of them there. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20120621/14efbece/attachment.html>

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