zooko wrote: > When thinking about compatibility, keep in mind the distinction > between two use cases: > > 1. You are using a tool (e.g. distutils or setuptools) to package > your work. You might consider switching to a new tool, either one > included in the Python Standard Library or a separately-shipped one, > to build, package, and distribute your software. > > 2. You are re-using other people's work that they have packaged and > distributed. You might consider switching to a new tool (either > Python Standard or separate) to re-use their work. > > Backwards compatibility in the first case is not overwhelmingly > important. Some people will be willing to entirely rewrite their > setup.py scripts to use a new tool, other people will be willing to > use a new tool only if they can keep using their old setup.py scripts, > and still other people will continue to package and distribute their > software with Python 2.5 and the distutils that came with it for the > forseeable future (let's say, for the next 5 years). We can't prevent > them from doing that, but also we don't need to persuade them to > change tools in order to benefit from their work.
I don't think it is accurate. I have no reason to doubt it is true in your case and many other people's case, but I think you have to be careful when saying 2 is "obviously" more important than 1. My impression is that 1 is important for people who invested a lot in distutils, have a lot of distutils-based extensions. It depends on the complexity of the setup.py and their build tools around. Again: numpy.distutils is as big a distutils. For numpy's case, a new well design would make most of those obsolete, but is it true for any package which has heavily invested in distutils ? >From your description, I understand that you care about dependencies, this kind of things. I know *I* don't care about that for the most part, and still I would welcome a new distutils. For me, something with a sane build tool (built around a DAG, not a sequence of commands) is what matters the most. Something which enables easier packaging by OS vendors matters. So I would kindly ask to be careful when taking into account what matters and what not. cheers, David _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
