[Distutils] a plea for backward-compatibility / smooth transitions

[Donald Stufft]

On Jul 30, 2013, at 1:13 PM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 4:14 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> Heh, I'm pretty good at getting yelled at :)
> 
> Nick is also pretty good at making people feel like he both knows and
> *cares* about their breakage, and isn't just dismissing their concerns
> as trivial or unimportant.  Breakage isn't trivial or unimportant to
> the person who's yelling, so this is an important
> community-maintenance skill.  It builds trust, and reduces the total
> amount of yelling.

*shrug*, If I didn't care I would have made this change as soon as Nick
said it was ok. Instead I declared I was going to and waited to make sure
nobody else had any concerns. And once Holger said he did I said
ok I won't do it. Maybe my mannerisms give the impression I don't but
that's actually pretty far from the truth. For this particular change I originally
created the pip commit that allowed it, and then again I created the setuptools
commit, backporting hashlib into setuptools to support Python 2.4. I put
a decent amount of effort into trying to make sure that nothing broke
but in the end there were still concerns :)

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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