[Distutils] distlib updated - comments sought

[Paul Moore]

On 5 October 2012 17:04, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> ~1300 of the ~20000 packages on pypi have trouble using setup.py as
> their build system / metadata source format.

That's interesting information. Do you know in what way they have
trouble with setup.py? Do they not use it at all, do they need
features it doesn't provide, or what?

> For the ~1300 broken packages, distutils is awful because it is not
> really extensible, though setuptools tried.

Yeah, that's the common complaint. Plus, "it's too extensible" :-)
(From people trying to change it who have to deal with all the fancy
hacks people have done).

> People have to install setuptools against their will because there is
> only one implementation of the pkg_resources API and 75% of the
> packages on pypi require setuptools.

I wish we could separate pkg_resources and setuptools. I'd love to
know which packages needed each (but I suspect that's not a question
that can be answered without looking at the actual code). Ignoring the
egg support aspects, pkg_resources is something that could be replaced
- a reasonable proportion of distlib offers alternatives to the
pkg_resources code, and more could be added. On the other hand,
setuptools per se is almost entirely a build time facility, so
shouldn't be needed at runtime (and so using it for build should be
relatively unimportant).

Paul