[Distutils] Timeframe of 2.0 again?

[Mark W. Alexander]

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 amk at amk.ca wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 24, 2003 at 08:55:21PM -0400, Mark W. Alexander wrote:
> > Marc's point is that nested scopes are not necessary (although they
> > could be useful) in distutils itself, therefore distutils should not
> > require a high enough level just to be able to use nested scopes.
>
> It's actually not so much language features as new modules that are of
> interest. I have no great problems leaving the code base compatible with the
> 1.5.2 *language*; string methods, and perhaps 'print >>', would be
> convenient, but having them wouldn't make the Distutils code much shorter or
> better.

Right, that's what I meant to say you meant ;)

> On the other hand, Python 2.3 adds optparse, which might let us discard
> fancy_getopt, and the logging package would be useful for the output from
> Distutils commands.  We could try to install the modules if the Distutils
> are being installed on a pre-2.3 version, but that would be a lot of trouble
> -- back-porting the modules, copying them into the distribution, etc.

Well, if the target for Distutils2 is 2.4, we could freeze Distutils1
for use with pre-2.4 implementations. Package authors could still target
pre-2.4 Pythons using bdist* commands because the format of native
binary packages shouldn't be changing, just the method of producing
them. Although they _would_ have to make a conscious effort to limit
there use of language features to their lowest supported Python version.

Package users who need the features of a Distutils2 package that
leverages new features would then be motivated to move to 2.4. That's
the only reason I haven't upgraded so many of my machines: I haven't had
to so I couldn't justify it. If I had to for new functionality, then the
upgrade labor is justified.

It's late. I'm tired. I hope that made sense...
--
Mark W. Alexander
slash at dotnetslash.net