[Distutils] Extracting distutils into setuptools

[Ned Deily]

On Sep 27, 2017, at 13:31, Steve Dower <steve.dower at python.org> wrote:
> setuptools is totally welcome in my book to simply copy the compiler infrastructure we already have from core and never look back. It really does need to be maintained separately from CPython, especially on Windows where we continue to get innovation in the targeted tools. I know it's a big ask, and it's one that I can't personally commit real time to (though I obviously will as much as possible), but I do think it is necessary for our ecosystem to not be tied to CPython release cycles.

Whatever is done, keep in mind that currently distutils is required to build Python itself, e.g. the standard library.  And that at least one important project, numpy, already subclasses distutils.

--
  Ned Deily
  nad at python.org -- []