[Python-Dev] "setuptools has divided the Python community"

[David Cournapeau]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 8:28 PM, Ben Finney
<bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> wrote:

>
> I would argue that the Python community has a wealth of people quite
> capable of taking on this particular task, and if it makes the core
> architecture and maintenance of ‘distutils’ simpler to remove special
> cases for binary installers, I think that's a pearl of great price.

I think there are two points making binary installers pluggable, so
that they are independent of a core distutils, and including such
plugins in the stdlib. Nobody argues against the first case: that's
certainly a common complain that distutils is a big ball of code where
everything is intervened.

Concerning contribution for windows binaries: as the current numpy
developer in charge of windows binaries and windows support for a
while, my experience is that the windows situation for contribution is
very different from the other platforms. The mentality is just
different. At the risk of an overly broad and unfair generalization,
my experience is that on windows, people just want things to work,
complain when they do not, and almost never contribute back to make it
work, or when they do, they are almost never familiar with how things
work on other platforms, so they suggest broken fixes.

To say it differently: I mostly use Linux, the less time I am on
windows, the happier I am, but bdist_wininst is the only distutils
bdist_* command I care about.

cheers,

David