Martin v. Löwis wrote: > Talin schrieb: >> To that extent, it can be useful sometimes to have someone who is in the >> process of learning how to use the system, and who is willing to >> carefully analyze and write down their own experiences while doing so. > > I readily agree that the documentation can be improved, and applaud > efforts to do so. And I have no doubts that distutils is difficult to > learn for a beginner. > > In Talin's remarks, there was also the suggestion that distutils is > "in need of some serious refactoring". It is such remarks that get > me started: it seems useless to me to make such a statement if they > are not accompanied with concrete proposals what specifically to > change. It also gets me upset because it suggests that all prior > contributors weren't serious.
I'm sorry if I implied that distutils was 'misdesigned', that wasn't what I meant. Refactoring is usually desirable when a body of code has accumulated a lot of additional baggage as a result of maintenance and feature additions, accompanied by the observation that if the baggage had been present when the system was originally created, the design of the system would have been substantially different. Refactoring is merely an attempt to discover what that original design might have been, if the requirements had been known at the time. What I was reacting to, I think, is that it seemed like in some ways the 'diffness' of setuptools wasn't just in the documentation, but in the code itself, and if both setuptools and distutils had been co-developed, then distutils might have been someone different as a result. Also, I admit that some of this is hearsay, so maybe I should just back off on this one. > Regards, > Martin _______________________________________________ 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
