[Distutils] [Distribute] What versions should we support?

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 10:57 PM, Lennart Regebro<regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> More specifically, Python 2.3 and/or 2.4?
>
> The current trunk (or whatever mercurial calls it) doesn't work with
> 2.4, because of a try/except/finally clause. That's fixable, but I
> ain't gonna fix it if we don't want to support 2.4 any more. I would
> claim that we should support 2.4.
>

I think we can release a 2.4-compatible bugfix version then focus on
making it evolve with Distutils trunk.

It should be the 0.6 final version.

Then we can focus on working on the 0.7 series that will work with
Distutils current trunk.

When Python 2.7/3.2 are out, I am planning to release a standalone
version of Distutils that will work starting at 2.5.
Which means that the 0.7 series of Distribute will be able to work with it.

>From there we can maintain a 0.6.x maintenance branch that will work
with vanilla Python from 2.4 to 2.6 + 3.1
and a 0.7.x branch that will work with Python 2.7/3.2 and 2.5/2.6/3.1
if the users install the Distutils backport.

Which means that the roadmap of Distribute is indexed with Python :

- 0.6 final : asap
- 0.6.x : maintenance releases - not sure when they are released
- 0.7 alphas/betas : indexed with Python 2.7/3.2 alphas/betas
- 0.7 final:  : indexed with Python 2.7/3.2 final
- 0.7.X  : maintenance releases - not sure when they are released

The only problem with 2.4 I can see is that the tarfile module is badly broken.
So I propose shipping a backport of the 2.5 tarfile module with
Distribute 0.6 final.
(that's what I do with customer projects)

The other open question we need to think about is how to split the
distribution into several
distributions starting at 0.7.

e.g. what should be taken out Distribute 0.7 to live on its own.

Obviously, pkg_resources can be on a single distribution. (that
requires another name :) ) starting at 0.1,
when Distribute 0.7 is out

What else do we want to take out ? easy_install ? While is implemented
like a distutils command in
setuptools, it could be a standalone script like pip does.

Cheers
Tarek