[Python-Dev] BDFL delegation for PEP 426 (PyPI metadata 1.3) (original) (raw)

PJ Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Sun Feb 3 21:04:04 CET 2013

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

The rationale for the distutils freeze is "don't break setuptools". That rationale still holds.

IIRC, the historical issue that triggered the freeze was not that the distutils refactoring broke setuptools, but that it did so in what was supposed to be a bugfix-only release of Python, via a change to what appeared to be a public/documented method.

This rationale doesn't apply to major/minor releases of Python, and the freeze was only supposed to apply to 2.x in any event. (IIRC, some of the breakage was the result of backporting 3.x distutils changes to 2.x.)

Anyway, adding features or refactoring distutils is not the problem: doing it in bugfix releases is. With normal releases, third-party extenders of distutils at least have the opportunity to test and issue updates in a timely fashion.

More information about the Python-Dev mailing list