[Distutils] Why I like eggs (or similar mechanisms) and my thoughts on future of buildout

[Jim Fulton]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 12:29 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>
> On Aug 21, 2016, at 12:19 PM, Jim Fulton <jim at jimfulton.info> wrote:
>
> I'm open to shelling out, but pessimistic that it will turn out well. I
> started with that approach initially with easy_install and it fell apart
> quickly.  But when we get into it... who knows?
>
>
>
> Shelling out is currently the only exposed “API” that pip has, we’re not
> opposed to adding extra APIs though. Our current approach has been to wait
> and see for people to come out with specific use cases they have for an API
> and then work together to figure out what API we can create that satisfies
> that. Thus far we’ve accomplished this by creating new libraries that
> aren’t pip and moving functionality out of pip (and setuptools) and into
> those libraries, and then making pip/setuptools consume those. This has
> generally worked pretty well I think, as it’s easier to be careful not to
> accidentally expose some terrible internal details of pip as public API
> when it’s a new, carefully designed thing, and we can make working with
> those libraries better than it is to simply expose some part of pip. We
> generally pair this along with defining things in PEPs so that these new
> libraries don’t become the new distutils/setuptools/pip (e.g.,
> implementation defined standards) which should ideally allow anyone to
> create a from scratch implementation and have it interopt just fine.
>

Sounds reasonable. (I'd seen similar statements before, which I'd alluded
to in another message.) Thanks.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton
http://jimfulton.info
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