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

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 27 Mar, 2009, at 7:49, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:

> On 2009-03-27 04:19, Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> - keep distutils, but start deprecating certain higher-level
>> functionality in it (e.g. bdist_rpm)
>> - don't try to provide higher-level functionality in the stdlib, but
>> instead let third party tools built on top of these core APIs compete
>
> Should this be read as:
>
> - remove bdist_rpm from the stdlib and let it live on PyPI
>
> ?
>
> Perhaps I just misunderstand the comment.
>
> I think that esp. the bdist_* commands help developers a lot by
> removing the need to know how to build e.g. RPMs or Windows
> installers and let distutils deal with it.
>
> The bdist_* commands don't really provide any higher level
> functionality. They only provide interfaces to certain packaging
> formats commonly used on the various platforms.
>
> Instead of removing such functionality, I think we should add
> more support for standard packaging formats to distutils, e.g.
> bdist_deb, bdist_pkg, etc.

IIRC the reason for wanting to deprecate bdist_rpm (and not adding  
bdist_deb, ...) is that the variour Linux distributions have varying  
policies for how to package Python code and those policies tend to  
vary on another schedule than the Python development schedule. The  
result of this is that the Linux distributors are incapable to use  
bdist_rpm.  It would therefore be better to ensure that Python  
packages / distutils can provide the metadata that's needed to build  
packages and move the actual creation of OS installers outside of the  
core where the tool can be maintained by people that have detailed  
knowlegde about the needs of the packaging system and system policies.

Ronald


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