[Python-Dev] Integrate BeautifulSoup into stdlib?

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 12:26 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>> Tools like setuptools, zc.buildout, etc. seem great for developers but not
>> very good for distributions.  At last year's Pycon I think there was
>> agreement from the Linux distributors that distutils, etc. just wasn't very
>> useful for them.
>
> I think distutils is different here - it not only helps creating
> distributions (i.e. deployable package files), but also allows
> direct installation. This, in turn, is used to build the packages
> for Linux distributions. E.g. debian/rules often contains a
> "setup.py install" call in its build step (and there is even a
> CDBS python-distutils.mk fragment)
>
> In that sense, distutils is for Python what make is for C.

It is more like the whole autotools suite (at least for unix), and
that's the problem: distutils does everything quite poorly, and once
you need to do something that distutils can't do out of the box, you
are in a no man's land because distutils is almost impossible to
extend (everything is done internally, with no way to recover data
short of rewriting everything or monkey patching). To take a recent
example, I wanted to add the ability to install a clib extension (pure
C, no python API), so that it can be used by other projects: that
would take 2 minutes with any build tool out there, but is almost
impossible in distutils, unless you rewrite your own build_clib and/or
install commands. Even autotools is more enjoyable, which is quite an
achievement :)

If distutils was split into different modules (one for the build, one
for the compiler/platform configuration, one for the installation),
which could be extended, tweaked, it would be much better. But the
distutils design makes this inherently very difficult (commands).

cheers,

David