Hi Nick, > I believe you're confused about what distutils is for.
Tell me.. > It generates > platform independent metadata that can be used to create platform > specific installers. It also generates some platform independent Python > specific installation formats that are useful for developers, but don't > really play well with the native platform installation mechanisms. Well I can understand that.. no problem. > Yes, there are some bdist_* commands that let you build something > vaguely resembling a platform specific installer, but those are so far > from being full fledged installer development tools it really isn't funny. I think we've strayed from the topic in so far as there still is a need in many cases to pack an application into a zip box and ship it out. Think how useful it would be to ship Django or Plone from a zip box... > Perhaps we should take it out and make it an external project rather > than having something that only kind-of-sort-of almost works in the > standard library. My $20 says not enough good PEPs, developers, directions or decisions. I doubt distutils will be replaced. Too much time and effort has been spent on bandaids to keep it running. Pypi has some 8700+ packages that depend on wholly on a bandaid supply. Nobody clever goes and pulls a bandage off a mummy until they're sure that the head and legs won't come off too at the same time. The situation is that the information neccessary to make a proper decision really isn't at hand. For me, I would want to do a lot more analysis of pypi packages and what their structural shape is before going to the next step. Seriously Nick, you can't stop people putting on more bandaids on distutils. More importantly, there are too many people out there who would notice if a big change was made.. These are the major reasons why significant direction change is difficult. Lack of information on the state of pypi packages. Hope that answers David David _______________________________________________ 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
