[Python-Dev] PEP 376

[Paul Moore]

2009/6/30 Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org>:
> And is there consensus outside of it? (Remember the ipaddr debacle.
> It's easy for people to miss an important PEP.)

My impression (as someone who does read the distutils SIG, but in all
honesty has very little practical interest in distutils internals):

- It's very focused on distutils internals. If it has an impact on end
users (as opposed to packagers), it's very hard to discern. The only
hint of such a thing is the mention of an uninstall function. But it's
only an API. So still no end user impact [1] :-(
- The terminology and focus feels setuptools-inspired (my apologies if
that's not the case). Expect pushback from setuptools haters...
- It's quite dense for the casual reader not familiar with the
terminology. I've never managed to read the whole thing through,
personally.

I'd suggest two things:
- Add a section to the PEP describing the purely end user impact of the changes
- Post that to python-list, with a note pointing to the PEP for people
who care about distutils details

If that gets no feedback, you've done as much as you can.

Paul.

[1] I'd actually like it if the PEP defined an uninstall command -
something like "python -m distutils.uninstall packagename". It can be
as minimalist as you like, but I'd like to see it present.