[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 11:05:43 +0200
Dirkjan Ochtman <dirkjan at ochtman.nl> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Tarek Ziadé <tarek at ziade.org> wrote:
> > So I prefer to hold it and have a solid implementation in the stldib. The
> > only thing I am asking is to retain ourselves to do *anything* in distutils
> > and continue to declare it frozen, because I know it will be tempting to do
> > stuff there...
> 
> That policy has been a bit annoying. Gentoo has been carrying patches
> forever to improve compilation with C++ stuff (mostly about correctly
> passing on environment variables), and forward-porting them on every
> release gets tedious, but the packaging/distutils2 effort has made it
> harder to get them included in plain distutils. I understand there
> shouldn't be crazy patching in distutils, but allowing it to inch
> forward a little would make the lives of the Gentoo Python team
> easier, at least.

I think the whole idea that distutils should be frozen and improvements
should only go in distutils2 has been misled. Had distutils been
improved instead, many of those enhancements would already have been
available in 3.2 (and others would soon be released in 3.3).

Deciding to remove packaging from 3.3 is another instance of the same
mistake, IMO.

Regards

Antoine.