[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[Tarek Ziadé]

On 6/20/12 11:49 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Jun 2012 11:22:07 +0200
> Tarek Ziadé<tarek at ziade.org>  wrote:
>> I tried to improve Distutils and I was stopped and told to start
>> distutils2, because
>> distutils is so rotten, any *real* change/improvment potentially brakes
>> the outside world.
> If distutils was so rotten, distutils2 would not reuse much of its
> structure and concepts (and test suite), would it?
'much' is pretty vague here. distutils2 is a fork of distutils, that has 
evolved a *lot*

if you look at the code, beside the compilation part and some commands, 
most things are different.

distutils is "rotten" because when you change its internals, you might 
break some software
that rely on them.

>
> Most of the distutils2 improvements (new PEPs, setup.cfg, etc.) were
> totally possible in distutils, weren't they?
I started there, remember ? And we ended up saying it was impossible to 
continue without
breaking the packaging world.

>>> Deciding to remove packaging from 3.3 is another instance of the same
>>> mistake, IMO.
>> So what are your suggesting, since you seem to know what's a mistake and
>> what's not ?
> I don't have any suggestion apart from keeping packaging in 3.3.
>
> But I also think it would be better for the community if people were
> not delusional when making decisions. Removing packaging from 3.3 is a
> big risk: users and potential contributors will be even less interested
> than they already are.
That's a good point. But if no one works on its polishing *now*, it's 
going to be the same effect on people:
they'll likely to be very annoyed if the replacer is not rock solid.
>
> Here's a datapoint: distribute (*) is downloaded 100x more times than
> distutils2 (**).
>
> (*) http://pypi.python.org/pypi/distribute/
> (**) http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Distutils2/

why would you expect a different datapoint ?

- Distutils2 was released as a beta software, and not really promoted yet

- Distribute is downloaded automatically by many stacks out there, and 
PyPI does not make a difference
    whether the hit was from a human behind pip, or from a stack like 
zc.buildout

>
> Regards
>
> Antoine.
>
>
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