[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

[Ian Bicking]

On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 10:28 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> David Cournapeau wrote:
>
>> I don't understand what's there to buy. Several people reported
>> distutils errors without any backtrace, though a fair shared of those
>> were caused by our own extensions.
>
> distutils specifically swallows exceptions and formats them for users by
> default. After all, it is trying to behave like a regular command line
> program that interacts with users, not developers. This is easily
> overridable for developers who are trying debug problems by setting the
> environment variable DISTUTILS_DEBUG=1. This will make distutils just give
> the traceback.

In the tools I've written, I generally give the traceback if the
verbosity is turned up, and in a case like this (an unexpected
exception -- for distutils that's any exception except a few that
distutils defines) I include "use -v for more".

I think distutils (or Distribute) could do the same.

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org  |  http://topplabs.org/civichacker