On Fri, 4 Sep 2020 at 16:53, Fred Drake <f...@fdrake.net> wrote: > > On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 11:02 AM Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > > While I agree with the general suggestion of deprecating distutils as a > > publicly-visible module (in favour of encouraging users to rely on > > setuptools), it seems to me that the argument of facilitating the > > development of third-party build systems is what already encouraged the > > official policy of not adding features to distutils (more than 10 > > years ago, IIRC). > > My recollection is that we decided to stop changing distutils because > too many 3rd party extensions (often included directly in the packages > that needed them) using undocumented parts fo distutils directly > (since there was no substantially documented API for distutils in the > beginning). Every time anything changed, something was broken for > somebody. Since that affected not only the developers hooking in to > distutils but the users of their packages, touching distutils caused > too much pain.
I believe that's correct. My main concern here is that removing distutils from the stdlib won't have made that problem any better, it will simply have transferred the responsibility onto the setuptools maintainers. While I assume that they are comfortable with that, I suspect they may take a different position on backwards compatibility than core Python does (not least because one copy of setuptools has to support multiple python versions, including alternative versions like PyPy, whereas the stdlib copy only needs to handle the version of Python it's distributed with). I think the arguments in favour of this PEP from CPython's point of view are fairly strong, but the arguments from the point of view of the wider Python ecosystem are much less clear. Paul _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/QRCA2AHOGZMQS45DANW4UGA63WTMJVQ6/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
