[python-committers] Wording about packaging in the 3.3 announcement

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 12:20 AM, Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org> wrote:
> The whatsnew document has the same problem, and also mixes packaging (venv
> and packaging) with imports (namespace packages), but I did not get a chance
> to fix it before today, so I probably will after the alpha.

Those additions were from me, and were a result of the fact that those
are *big* changes that should have a huge positive impact for end
users in the long run, but weren't being advertised in the What's New
at all. (packaging was at least mentioned in the "new modules"
section, but replacing the framework for component distribution
deserves a lot more prominence than that - it's far more significant
for the future of Python than minor syntactic changes like PEP 380 or
409).

The reason they're lumped together like that is because they're all
related to code distribution - namespace packages are about being able
to easily split up a single Python package across multiple installed
components, PEP 405 is about maintaining multiple independent sets of
installed components on a single machine, and packaging/pysetup is the
new system for building and installing components in general.

While it makes sense that Raymond doesn't want to devote too much time
to cleaning up What's New until the feature set stabilises in the
first beta, we need to remember that alpha users also need some
pointers to the shiny new toys we'd like them to tinker with. pysetup
and pyvenv in particular are rather hard to test in an automated
fashion, so we'd really like people hammering on them manually. In the
absence of preliminary entries on those topics, I added the shorthand
section so that they were at least mentioned and users would know to
go look at them and try them out. Ideally, each of those bullet points
will be expanded out to an entire section in their own right.

Cheers,
Nick.

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