[Distutils] What's special about numpy, scipy, ...was: Remove distutils, was: red, green, refactor ...

[Thomas Güttler]

Am 21.10.2015 um 18:46 schrieb Chris Barker:
> On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Thomas Güttler <guettliml at thomas-guettler.de <mailto:guettliml at thomas-guettler.de>> wrote:
> 
>     I ask myself: Why a standard? I see that a standard is very important if there will be
>     several implementations (for example TCP/IP, protocols like HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, ...)
> 
>     But here a single implementation for creating and installing packages would be enough.
> 
>     Is a standard really needed?
> 
> 
> Yes -- because of exactly what you say above -- we really can't have a SINGLE build system that will well support everything --
>  the common use-caes, sure (distutils already does that), but when it comes to bulding complex packages like numpy, sciPy, etc, it's really inadequate.

What happens if the common use cases are inadequate?

My guess: re-inventing the same stuff over and over again. Once in numpy, once in scipy ...

Why should it be impossible to get all the needs of numpy and scipy into setuptools?

I have a dream: For packaging and building package provides only **data**. Data is condition-less: No single "if", "def" or method call. Just data: json or yaml ...

Even for complex packages. 

This data gets processed by setuptools. I don't see a need for more than one library doing this. Plugins are nice and can solve edge cases.

Regards,
  Thomas Güttler

-- 
http://www.thomas-guettler.de/