Anthony Baxter wrote: > I've checked distutils into the python sandbox for a major > chunk of refactoring, including killing distutils.log and > distutils.fancy_getopt. I plan to upgrade the minimum > required version of distutils to 2.3 - I will be using > the logging and optparse modules from the stdlib. This > means that the version of distutils included in 2.4 will > be the last version guaranteed to work on 2.1 and 2.2 -- > but I seriously question whether anyone is ever going to > be making standalone distutils distributions again.
That's not really the point: the reason we keep the compatibility to Python 2.1 is that package builders and users building the packages themselves will want to create builds for various Python versions, so that need a distutils version that works with mutiple recent Python versions. If you now jump to Python 2.3 as requirement, package authors will have to adapt their setup.py and associated distutils files to work with yet another variation of backend system. This is bound to break the simple install instructions of "python setup.py install" one way or another. It will also not be possible to use new developments in distutils for packages targetted for Python versions prior to Python 2.3 and - because distutils is normally extended via subclassing - make it harder to have setup.pys which work across multiple Python versions. I'd suggest to have distutils use the new tools from Python 2.3 if available, but still continue to ship its own versions for Python versions prior to 2.3. If you really want to bump the minimum required version for the complete package, then the next obvious choice would be Python 2.2 - in general, I think keeping backwards compatibility to the last 3 released Python versions is a good approach and gives enough time to the users, packagers and authors to adapt their software to new requirements. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Jun 21 2005) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ ::: Try mxODBC.Zope.DA for Windows,Linux,Solaris,FreeBSD for free ! :::: _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
