[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

[Greg Ewing]

David Cournapeau wrote:
> One of the
> main argument to avoid rewrite is that you will end up doing the same
> mistakes, and old code is more complicated because it has been tested.
> But here, we know what a good design is like as other languages have
> vastly superior solutions to this problem.

Also, it seems to me that in this case, the basic
architecture of distutils is already so full of
mistakes that there just isn't an incremental way
of getting to a better place, especially given the
requirement of not breaking any existing setup.py
scripts together with the fact that the API of distutils
effectively consists of its *entire implementation*.

So while complete rewrites are best avoided *if possible*,
I don't think we have a choice in this case.

-- 
Greg