P.J. Eby wrote: > At 09:15 PM 11/29/2009 +0100, Tarek Ziadé wrote: >> 2009/11/29 P.J. Eby <p...@telecommunity.com>: >> [..] >> > >> > WSGI and setuptools have been widely adopted in spite of their >> technical and >> > ideological flaws, because they had good incentive engineering. >> > >> > Or, in other words, because practicality beats purity, every single >> time. >> >> Do you mean here that this independently-created standard, this good >> incentive engeneering a.k.a. >> Setuptools, is doomed not to evolve anymore ? e.g. to adapt its >> standard to a common standard that is going to raise and be added in >> stldib at some point ? > > I'm saying that ignoring backwards compatibility (as MAL and Ben have > proposed) is bad incentive engineering.
Ignoring backwards compatibility is a bad thing, IMHO. Breaking forward compatibility (sometimes) is a good thing, since it allows evolution to find new better paths of development. Fact is, you are just misinterpreting what I wrote. You can't expect setuptools as-of today to work with a standard that is devised to be implemented by future tools. What you are referring to is breaking forward compatibility, ie. you expect today's setuptools to work with future packages that will be written against a future standard. New packages relying on the the new version format will, of course, require and use a package manager that supports the new format. If setuptools doesn't want to support it, that's fine. I'm sure Distribute will ... and could even support old setuptools packages by adding a --use-old-style-setuptools-package-format option ;-) to Distribute, so I don't see much of a problem with breaking forward compatibility in this case. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com Professional Python Services directly from the Source (#1, Nov 30 2009) >>> Python/Zope Consulting and Support ... http://www.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC.Zope.Database.Adapter ... http://zope.egenix.com/ >>> mxODBC, mxDateTime, mxTextTools ... http://python.egenix.com/ ________________________________________________________________________ ::: Try our new mxODBC.Connect Python Database Interface for free ! :::: eGenix.com Software, Skills and Services GmbH Pastor-Loeh-Str.48 D-40764 Langenfeld, Germany. CEO Dipl.-Math. Marc-Andre Lemburg Registered at Amtsgericht Duesseldorf: HRB 46611 http://www.egenix.com/company/contact/ _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig