[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

[David Lyon]

On Sun, 8 Nov 2009 23:28:42 -0600, Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote:

> In the tools I've written, I generally give the traceback if the
> verbosity is turned up, and in a case like this (an unexpected
> exception -- for distutils that's any exception except a few that
> distutils defines) I include "use -v for more".
> 
> I think distutils (or Distribute) could do the same.

Hi Ian,

I think PIP is quite an accomplishment.

But don't you think that its a big ask to refactor distutils/distribute 
to redo their error messages for package building?

imo the basic problem in setup.py and package building comes from 
ambiguity in the file specification section. Everything else is 
pretty much ok.

With the declarative format David C is hinting at (from Haskell) it
should be a lot easier to collect those files up and put them
in a .tar.gz archive.

I'm just wondering if you've ever thought about the tool chain
on the other side from pip. Like how hard is it to create archive
files of source with all the right stuff. So I guess what's your
take on how close to being right is David C?

Best Regards

David