[Python-Dev] Raising objections

[Guido van Rossum]

On 4/20/06, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Anthony Baxter wrote:
>
> >>http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
>
>  From what I remember, he didn't actually say that you
> should never rewrite anything, but that if you do, you
> need to be prepared for a very long period of time
> when nothing new is working, and that *if you are a
> commercial company* this is a bad idea.
>
> But Python is not dependent on getting new features
> out the door before its competitors in order to
> survive, so this doesn't really apply. It doesn't
> matter if people have to make do with the old
> distutils for a while until something better is
> available.

I think it's more a matter of scale. Rewriting small pieces of code is
fine. Joel's argument applies to attempts at rewriting *entire
systems* that cause massive loss of information on why things were the
way they were.

I don't think distutils, huge "ball of mud" as it is, hass quite
crossed the size threshold that Joel was thinking of; but it *is* an
extremely valuable repository of outlandish information about the
bizarre details of many different platform, and as such I'd be
hesitant undertaking a wholesale rewrite.

I'd rather recommend the approach that Joel suggests for truly large
systems: refactoring smaller components while keeping the overall
structure intact. I find 100% backwards compatibility perhaps less
interesting (not uninteresting, just less) than preserving the body of
knowledge that is uniquely encapsulated in distutils.

Unfortunately, this is mixed in with some stuff that isn't part of
distutils' "core competency", like text utilities, process spawning,
and option parsing. These should (eventually, when the 2.1
compatibility requirement is lifted) be refactored to use (or be
merged into) the available stdlib facilities for such functionaliy.

--
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)