At 06:53 PM 10/5/2009 +0200, Lennart Regebro wrote:
Possibly if you somehow think it's the Distribute teams fault that a bugfix in Python ended up breaking setuptools. If it would have been better not to fix that bug, then the blame reasonably goes to the Python core developers, not the Distribute team.
In this case, though, the "Python core developer" is also the Distribute lead. (i.e., it was Tarek who made the changes to the distutils.) So it's a bit understandable that some people might wonder if there was a conflict of interest.
I don't personally think that's the case; it's pretty much inevitable that the distutils making progress means other things will break. But it's easy to see how others might take the situation another way, or treat it as an example of Distribute policy towards backward compatibility, or of what kind of breakage is considered acceptable in a dot release.
It would be good to bear in mind that extending the distutils (or setuptools) is *not* monkeypatching; both libraries provide explicit assurance that subclassing is in fact allowed. And there's nothing all that special about setuptools' subclassing of build_ext; in fact, if you look back in the archives here, other people have done equivalent subclassing to support dynamic library building. I haven't checked their code, but there is a strong possibility that it would also fail in the same way. This is not really about monkeypatching, or about special support for setuptools.
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