[Python-Dev] Reminder: Distutils vs Distutils2

[Tarek Ziadé]

Hello,

I have seen some efforts recently to improve Distutils in the standard library,

Just a quick reminder of the status of Distutils: it's frozen and is
just being bug fixed at this time. The work I done last year was
reverted and pushed to Distutils2.
A lot of work has been done since then, and we had 4 GSOC students
working this summer on Distutils2.

It's backward-incompatible, so we can remove the things we don't like
and add new things w/o suffering from backward compatibility pains.

So if you want to improve the tool, or if you have some pending
changes to Distutils, I would encourage you to join the Distutils2
effort and not to waste time on Distutils anymore.  The patches that
did not make it to Distutils can still be added in Distutils2, for
most of them.

The workflow we currently use to change the code is as follow and make
it easy for everyone to contribute:

1. clone http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distutils2
2. discuss / propose a patch on IRC (#distutils - Freenode) or on the
dedicated mailing list
(http://groups.google.com/group/the-fellowship-of-the-packaging)
3. I review and merge all changes at bitbucket, then push them on
http://hg,python.org/distutils2

Crazy ideas are welcome. "setup.py" is gone in d2 for instance ;)

Thanks !

Regards.
Tarek

-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org