[Distutils] Entry points: specifying and caching

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Fri, Oct 20, 2017, at 12:50 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> * Since it is a packaging standard, then it is expected that all
> packaging tools will be updated to work with it.

Where packaging tools need to know about it,  they already have to.
Where they don't, writing a standard doesn't imply that every tool has
to implement it. Documenting it doesn't change either case, it just
makes life easier for tools that do need to use it.

> * We’re explicitly saying that this is the one true way of solving this
> problem in the Python ecosystem.

I don't buy that at all. We're saying that it exists, and this is what
it is.

> * We stifle innovation (hell just including it in setutools at all does
> this, but we can’t unopen that can of worms).

I don't think that's true to any significant extent. Having a standard
does not stop people coming up with something better.

> * We make it actively harder to improve the feature (since once it’s part
> of the purview of packaging standards, all of distutils-sig gets to weigh
> in on improvements).

It hasn't changed in years, as far as I know, and it's so widely used
that any change is likely to break a load of stuff anyway. As we've
already discussed for caching, we can improve by building *on top* of it
relatively easily. And ultimately I think that bringing it out into
daylight leads to a healthier future than leaving it under the stone
marked 'setuptools''.