Hi Richard, all, two first notes on PEP439.
backward compat with present-day release files: the PEP should state it as a goal or at least discuss it in some depth. In that context, the choice of providing a bootstrap for pip rather than easy_install needs reasoning. One problem with pip, compared to easy_install, is that it doesn't support eggs which is a problem particularly on Windows machines where often no fitting C compiler is available. If the remedy here is to support wheels and recommend it's use, it is still a backward compatibility problem: many users will not be able to use the builtin-supported installer to install todays existing egg release files. setuptools and distlib: Even if Python3.4+ had a mature distlib providing minimal setuptools functionality, how would it work for the typical "python setup.py install" which is invoked by pip? Often those setup.py scripts depend on a setuptools package. I am highlighting these two backward-compat aspects because otherwise we might run into this problem: http://xkcd.com/927/ and i understood that most people involved in improving the packaging ecology want to avoid that :) best, holger _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
