[Distutils] PEP 376 Status

[Floris Bruynooghe]

Hi

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 11:20:41AM +0100, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
> I've sent a mail after Pycon to request some comments on the work we
> have done during Pycon but I had no feedback at all :)
> 
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2010-March/015684.html
> 
> I realize that this piece of work is quite dense, and hard to follow.
> 
> (As a reminder the draft is here:
> http://hg.python.org/distutils2/file/tip/docs/design/wiki.rst)

This work calls for a systemwide sysconfig.cfg file which maps the
categories onto system locations.  I notice the example one contains
sections for "posix" and "posix_home" (among others), presumably the
"posix_home" one is for when using "setup.py --home".  But what about
the user site-packages directory (setup.py --user)?  Would it make
sense to have a sysconfig.cfg (or equivalent) file in the user
site-packages too?

On a tangent it seems to like --home should be deprecated in favour of
--user.  Any toughts on this?


As for the 1st point of the open issues - what about pkgutil.open()
without having to use a "setup.py develop"; here a half baked idea: If
the sys.path entry from which the current module came from does not
contain the setup.cfg metadata required can pkgutil.open() not assume
that it's a non-installed package/module and simply use the relative
path to find the resource?  Altough I can still see this getting messy
with non-inplace builds of extension modules.


Lastly has toydist's "toysetup.info" from David Cournapeau been
considered in the discussions on setup.cfg for distutils2?  It's a
pretty nice format and it actually has an implementation too.  I do
think there is value in that format to superseed the
setup.py/setup.cfg combination (there is the problem of setup.cfg now
becoming both a config file for the developer as well as a formal
description for the package distribution).  Currently it seems a lot
more verbose for tagging files under categories compared to the
proposed setup.cfg, but that might not be set in stone and I hope
David will be happy to incorporate reasonable proposals if this is
preceived to be a problem.


Regards
Floris

PS: Thanks for the work of writing up the PyCon packaging sprint!


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