On 6 September 2013 22:18, Ronald Oussoren <[email protected]> wrote: > That can be cleaned up by providing better internal interfaces, and should > have a change to succeed when proceeding in small steps. The hard part will > be to find a way forward that has good enough backward compatibility. > > But that's not what I'd like to see in the near future. Distutils should IMHO > provide enough functionality to integrate into the modern packaging > environment: > support for metadata 2.0 and support for creating wheel archives. > > That's all that's needed to keep distutils usable while someone tries to > design and implement a replacement for distutils or a much cleaned up version > of distutils itself.
Except it isn't, because distutils will *not* be updated in 2.6, 2.7, 3.2, 3.3 or 3.4 (after feature freeze in November), and the new metadata standards aren't expected to be stable until some time early next year (in the pip 1.6 time frame). That means we need a solution that will migrate most distutils projects to the new standards automatically, even when using older versions of the Python. In the absence of a "setuptools-lite" that only makes the minimal changes needed to support the metadata generation (without the additional features that require the use of setuptools specific syntax in setup.py), that solution will be to always import setuptools (thus monkey-patching distutils and registering additional commands), just as it is in pip today. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | [email protected] | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
