Phillip J. Eby wrote: > You seem to believe that there are other > things more important than making things Just Work for this audience.
While it's clearly a good thing when something "just works", I don't think that this should be the only goal. Just as important to my mind -- probably even more important -- is what the experience is like when things *don't* work. Because in such a varied world, you're never going to make everything "just work" for everyone all the time. When I type "make install" and something goes wrong, I find that there are two different kinds of experience I typically get: (1) I look at the Makefile, and find that it's written in a straightforward style. I can see what it's trying to do, find the problem, fix it, "make install" again and everything is all right. (2) I look at the Makefile and find that it's full of macros which get expanded and scripts that generate more files that get macro expanded again and wrapped up in duct tape and eventually somehow build something. I haven't a clue how it's supposed to work and don't have the time or inclination to figure it out. I give up. It sounds like (2) is the sort of experience that some people have been having with distutils. If that's true, then in the long run you are not going to improve matters by wrapping distutils up in yet another layer of magic, indirection and duct tape. You might succeed in making a certain number of things work that didn't work before. But when something breaks, it won't be any easier to fix than the original distutils, because it contains distutils as a major component. Rather than just trying to make a few more things "just work", we should be trying hard to improve the "just doesn't work" case. To do that, we need *LESS* magic, not more. We need to do things in as straightforward, obvious and transparent a way as possible -- so that when it goes wrong, you can see why it is going wrong and how to make it go right. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
