[Distutils] Improving distutils vs redesigning it (was people want CPAN)

[Lennart Regebro]

2009/11/12 David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp>:
> I am trying to understand what is 'nebulous' about our claims. We have
> given plenty of hard and concrete examples of things which are
> problematic in distutils. The major progress in our build issues have
> been achieved by dropping distutils. Up to now, the only people who have
> claimed that distutils can solve our problems are the people who are not
> involved at all with our projects, and the people who claim distutils
> cannot solve our problems are the people involved with it. That's odd to
> say the least.
>
> Now, I am ready to accept that we are missing the big picture and the
> rest  of the community knows more about it. But I certainly have not
> seen strong arguments to believe it so far.

Look, there is only one way this argument can be solved, and that is
by building something better than distutils. Honestly. Now, I'm sure
as heck not going to spend time on that, and Tarek don't think it's a
good idea, so it's up to you guys.

So I again ask:

1. Do you think the new PEPs in development should be followed? In
that case, what is the benefit of rewriting, instead of fixing?

2. When are you done?

Bitching that distutils needs to be scratched and rewritten is not
going to help. You need to DO it.

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
+33 661 58 14 64