Hi Distutils !
I don’t follow this list and haven’t looked at it in a long time. However,
I’m learning via twitter that a brand new setuptools release that’s just gone
out has just removed the “Feature” mechanism.
Now as you’re all rolling your eyes and preparing to bang out frustrated
replies how this was well announced and deprecated and warned about and wow
really didn’t you know the term paper was due today, OK first off let me say I
am sorry! I am not a distutils/setuptools maintainer. I am just someone
that uses it, and as I include setuptools in my setup.py, I am also getting
thousands of other people who download my product to use it as well. And I
don’t read the setuptools changelog! Or the setuptools blog. Or this list. I
assume you guys have it under control (and you certainly do!). There seem to
be other people like me (people who write very widely used software) who also
seem surprised! And that is surprising too (as I am usually the only person
to be surprised by these things that should not be surprising). So I hope you
can hold back your frustration with my clueless RTFMness long enough to answer
these questions:
1. where was this announced? I’m wondering why there weren’t loud blaring
blog posts and tweets all over the place stating that on March 6, dozens of
major packages are going to all break.
2. what is the plan for unmaintained packages and old versions of existing
packages on pypi that “import Feature” and can no longer be installed? Is it
just the case that a large amount of pypi just won’t install anymore?
3. What, if any, is the recommended approach going forward to a Python package
that wishes to specify a command-line flag during install. Here’s multiple
choice:
a. you can use new setuptools API <some new way to add —flags>
b. you can roll it yourself in setup.py using <hack X>
c. your setup.py should never accept any kind of flags as that interferes
with <up-and-coming use case Q>
d. other
If choice c., then here is another question. My library includes optional C
extensions. On certain platforms, these C extensions don’t build (like on
Pypy, or on Windows if you don’t have compilation tools installed). In this
regard it gracefully degrades. But also, I want to be able to have a command
line option to determine this as well. Because! Maybe I’m installing within a
test suite where I need to test the entire library without the C extensions
built. Maybe some user has found a bug in the C extensions, and that user
needs to temporarily install the tool without the extensions built. Other
cases for flags are, maybe your library can build with or without SSL support,
something like that.
Keep in mind, I actually *won’t* be getting bug reports about this because my
setup.py already gracefully degrades to distutils! But still, I’d like to have
my —without-cextensions flag somehow.
Thanks for listening and again I apologize for not following the setuptools
changelog on a regular basis!
- mike
_______________________________________________
Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
