[Distutils] Deprecate MANIFEST.in

[P.J. Eby]

At 05:32 PM 4/6/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>2009/4/6 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> > At 04:43 PM 4/6/2009 +0200, Lennart Regebro wrote:
> >>
> >> On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 16:04, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> >> > I don't understand why you're so anxious to deprecate something without
> >> > first understanding what it's for.
> >>
> >> If nobody understands it, that is in itself reason to replace it with
> >> something people understand.
> >
> > I mean understanding the use cases and how distutils features are used in
> > the field.  Deprecating something that people do understand and use, simply
> > because you don't understand or use it, is not responsible 
> stewardship for a
> > stdlib package, IMO.
>
>This is your point of view. But not the point of view of other people.
>
>And quit saying this is a unresponsible stewardship.
>
>IMHO the way you are driving setuptools since a few month now is *way* worse
>than anything done in this field.
>
>Unlike you, I am here to discuss things and try to find a consensus among
>people. And we have made more progress in a few months than you did I think.
>(people are working together and are not facing a bottleneck anymore)
>
>I didn't understand in the first place why people were moving away from
>distutils-SIG, now I get it .
>
>So please make you points but don't attack people that are trying to 
>move things
>forward this is not a correct behavior in the Python community.

I'm not attacking you for trying to move the distutils forward, I'm 
attacking the idea of deprecating MANIFEST.in -- or any other feature 
that people are using -- on the basis that another group of people 
doesn't like it or see how it's used.

(I'm against that in general, pretty much regardless of the 
feature...  and I'm aware that this is not an opinion shared by all 
of Python-Dev.)

My concern is simply that the route of refactoring distutils is going 
to create enough breakage *without* deprecating any features.  And 
deprecating features because you don't understand the use cases, 
means that in all probability, the new design will not adequately 
support those use cases.