On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:04:00 +0100, Lennart Regebro <rege...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Isn't this turning into the usual "distutils sucks and > should be rewritten but I can't explain why and how" rant? Len, I just want to revisit this, to hopefully close it. Those words are entirely yours. Not those who are able to explain how and why, with or without the rant. David C sums it up very nicely by saying that distutils works by implicit specification of build information. That's in contrast to the rest of the software world - using explicit build systems. If anything, everybody who's saying anything on the list now understands this and can live with it. For better or worse. There's some progress underway. There are commits happening. One very important thing to remember is just who started this request to look into 'cpan' style packaging in the first place. If I'm not wrong, it came right from the top. So go hassle whoever that might be. But even then, that's just a response to calls by plain ordinary users in the field. With CPAN, they would never label discussion or feedback as 'rant'. Actually, they went and had a beer, and fixed most of the issues *before* there could even be a complaint. That's still true today. > And isn't the answer still: "Well, do it then?" I refer you to reread Steffens original post. It is very helpful. No one person is able to do this. That being, redo distutils. There's something in Steffens post about 'the sum of the parts being greater..'. That entirely sums it up for me. It's too big a job for any one person to commence. One has to question what the return on investment would be. One could estimate that even a cheap distutils replacement could cost $80,000. That might get something - i guess. But who has that sort of time/money to throw around ? Certainly not the banks or the stock exchange brokers who use python for their own commercial benefit. So why ask it from the volunteers ? And if python management aren't united on the need for it, doing a distutils replacement becomes an even weaker proposition. If there is work underway.. lets just get it finished.. PEP-345 has been open since 2005. In CPAN it just would have been a beer fight and have been over in a weekend. Whatever... David _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
