[Distutils] "just use debian"

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 23:32:14 +0200, Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org> wrote:
> [snip]
>
>The marketing name does not have to be the same of the name of the
>module you import. The situation where they differ is even quite common.
>
>You can also argue for separating the name from the API version, like
>the soname of a library, and I’ll agree, but in the end it is very
>similar.

Do you think this is practical for non-trivial libraries?  For any
library which has more than one API, the possibility exists for one
API to change incompatibly and the other to remain compatible.  With
larger libraries, the value of changing the module name because one
(or some other small fraction of the whole) API changed incompatibly
decreases as compared to the cost of updating all software which uses
the library to use the new name (much of which may well be unaffected
by the incompatible change).

I am a huge fan of backward compatibility.  You may not find a bigger
one (at least in the Python community).  I can't understand how this
approach can be made feasible though.  Should the next release of Twisted
include a Python packaged named "twisted2" instead of "twisted"?  And the
one after that "twisted3"?  There are thousands of APIs in Twisted, and
we do change them incompatibly (after giving notice programmatically for
no less than 12 months).  Should we instead give up on this and make all
users of Twisted update their code to reflect the new name with each
release?

Jean-Paul