[Distutils] a plea for backward-compatibility / smooth transitions

[holger krekel]

Hi Donald,

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 14:04 -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:
> On Jul 30, 2013, at 1:13 PM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 4:14 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> >> Heh, I'm pretty good at getting yelled at :)
> > 
> > Nick is also pretty good at making people feel like he both knows and
> > *cares* about their breakage, and isn't just dismissing their concerns
> > as trivial or unimportant.  Breakage isn't trivial or unimportant to
> > the person who's yelling, so this is an important
> > community-maintenance skill.  It builds trust, and reduces the total
> > amount of yelling.
> 
> *shrug*, If I didn't care I would have made this change as soon as
> Nick said it was ok. Instead I declared I was going to and waited to
> make sure nobody else had any concerns. And once Holger said he did I
> said ok I won't do it. Maybe my mannerisms give the impression I don't
> but that's actually pretty far from the truth. For this particular
> change I originally created the pip commit that allowed it, and then
> again I created the setuptools commit, backporting hashlib into
> setuptools to support Python 2.4. I put a decent amount of effort into
> trying to make sure that nothing broke but in the end there were still
> concerns :)

For the record, i am all for putting generic hash support into the
installers and maybe prepare for an eventual change to make PyPI serve
sha256 hashes.  However, to me it's not clear if such a move may become
obsolete through the potential advent of TUF.

My original objection reason was tied to generally pushing for more focus 
on backward-compatibility.  I am grateful that several people including you,
Nick and Jannis acknowledged the point.

best,
holger

> -----------------
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
> 



> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig