[Distutils] Comments on PEP 426

[Nick Coghlan]

On 6 September 2013 22:18, Ronald Oussoren <ronaldoussoren at mac.com> wrote:
> That can be cleaned up by providing better internal interfaces, and should
> have a change to succeed when proceeding in small steps. The hard part will
> be to find a way forward that has good enough backward compatibility.
>
> But that's not what I'd like to see in the near future. Distutils should IMHO
> provide enough functionality to integrate into the modern packaging environment:
> support for metadata 2.0 and support for creating wheel archives.
>
> That's all that's needed to keep distutils usable while someone tries to
> design and implement a replacement for distutils or a much cleaned up version
> of distutils itself.

Except it isn't, because distutils will *not* be updated in 2.6, 2.7,
3.2, 3.3 or 3.4 (after feature freeze in November), and the new
metadata standards aren't expected to be stable until some time early
next year (in the pip 1.6 time frame).

That means we need a solution that will migrate most distutils
projects to the new standards automatically, even when using older
versions of the Python. In the absence of a "setuptools-lite" that
only makes the minimal changes needed to support the metadata
generation (without the additional features that require the use of
setuptools specific syntax in setup.py), that solution will be to
always import setuptools (thus monkey-patching distutils and
registering additional commands), just as it is in pip today.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia