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

Chris McDonough chrism at plope.com
Thu Jun 21 19:56:27 CEST 2012

On 06/21/2012 01:20 PM, Tarek Ziadé wrote:

On 6/21/12 6:44 PM, Chris McDonough wrote:

Yes. At the very least, there will be updated development snapshots (which are what buildout uses anyway). (Official releases are in a bit of a weird holding pattern. distribute's versioning scheme leads to potential confusion: if I release e.g. 0.6.1, then it sounds like it's a lesser version than whatever distribute is up to now. OTOH, releasing a later version number than distribute implies that I'm supporting their feature enhancements, and I really don't want to add new features to 0.6... but don't have time right now to clean up all the stuff I started in the 0.7 line either, since I've been hoping that the work on packaging would make 0.7 unnecessary. And let's not even get started on the part where system-installed copies of distribute can prevent people from downloading or installing setuptools in the first place.) Welp, I don't want to get in the middle of that whole mess. But maybe the distribute folks would be kind enough to do a major version bump in their next release; e.g. 1.67 instead of 0.67. That said, I don't think anyone would be confused by overlapping version numbers between the two projects. Oh yeah no problem, if Philip backports all the things we've done like Py3 compat, and bless more people to maintain setuptools, we can even discontinue distribute ! If not, I think you are just being joking here -- we don't want to go back into the lock situation we've suffered for many years were PJE is the only maintainer then suddenly disappears for a year, telling us no one that is willing to maintain setuptools is able to do so. (according to him) It's known that they have been diverging for a while. Yeah the biggest difference is Py3 compat, other than that afaik I don't think any API has been removed or modified. In my opinion, distribute is the only project that should go forward since it's actively maintained and does not suffer from the bus factor.

I'm not too interested in the drama/history of the fork situation so I don't care whether setuptools has the fix or distribute has it or both have it, but being able to point at some package which doesn't prevent folks from overriding sys.path ordering using PYTHONPATH would be a good thing.

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