[Distutils] People want CPAN :-)

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 7:14 AM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> David Cournapeau wrote:
>>
>> One of the
>> main argument to avoid rewrite is that you will end up doing the same
>> mistakes, and old code is more complicated because it has been tested.
>> But here, we know what a good design is like as other languages have
>> vastly superior solutions to this problem.
>
> Also, it seems to me that in this case, the basic
> architecture of distutils is already so full of
> mistakes that there just isn't an incremental way
> of getting to a better place, especially given the
> requirement of not breaking any existing setup.py
> scripts together with the fact that the API of distutils
> effectively consists of its *entire implementation*.
>
> So while complete rewrites are best avoided *if possible*,
> I don't think we have a choice in this case.

While "build_ext" is not handy, I don't buy the fact that Distutils is
"full of mistakes".
We have to work with use cases. David gave a use case: being able to
compile cython
or assembly files. I proposed a solution based on being able to define
a compiler
at the Extension level, rather that for the entire build_ext command.

If the answer to that solution is just: "Distutils sucks anyways..",
it is not really helpfull imho..

I don't see the point to write Distutils from scratch, instead of
making it evolve.

Tarek