Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin <at> gmail.com> writes: > > It will always be possible to ship a setup.py script that can > build/install from an sdist or VCS checkout. The issue is about how to > produce an sdist with a setup.py that is guaranteed to work with past, > current, and future versions of distutils/pip/setuptools/some other > installer so that you can upload it to PyPI and people can run 'pip > install myproj'. It shouldn't be necessary for the package author to > use distutils/setuptools in their setup.py just because the user wants > to install with pip/setuptools or vice-versa.
Agreed... But then, deprecating setup.py in favour of setup.cfg is a more promising path for cross-tool compatibility, than trying to promote one tool over another. > Distutils is tied down with backward compatibility because of the > number of projects that would break if it changed. Even obvious > breakage like http://bugs.python.org/issue12641 goes unfixed for years > because of worries that fixing it for 10000 users would break some > obscure setup for 100 users (no matter how broken that other setup > might otherwise be). I tend to disagree. Such bugs are not fixed, not because they shouldn't / can't be fixed, but because distutils isn't really competently maintained (or not maintained at all, actually; Éric sometimes replies on bug entries but he doesn't commit anything these days). The idea that "distutils shouldn't change" was more of a widely-promoted propaganda item than a rational decision, IMO. Most setup scripts wouldn't suffer from distutils changes or improvements; the few that *may* suffer belong to large projects which probably have other items to solve when a new Python comes out, anyway. Regards Antoine. _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
