> On Sep 29, 2017, at 5:16 PM, Steve Dower <steve.do...@python.org> wrote:
>
> I'm happy enough with this approach, my only problem with it is that I don't
> want to be maintaining two versions (the new one that we want people to
> change to, and the old one so that people keep working with new versions of
> Python without having to change to the new one).
>
> If we don't make a very clear statement that "distutils is no longer being
> maintained, it probably won't build valid extensions on 3.[7/8/whatever], and
> we mean it this time" then it doesn't count. I insist on at least removing
> the distutils tests from the test suite, since as long as those need to pass
> I can never stop maintaining the stdlib version. And that puts this in the
> realm of python-dev, which means a PEP to formally deprecate distutils (that
> I'm happy to co-author) and recommend an alternative, as well as the
> alternative path needed to build the core extension modules on non-Windows
> platforms.
As long as CPython itself depends on distutils I don’t think we can break or
remove distutils, but we can move make it a shim over something that is better
architecturally and easier to maintain. The tests should still pass in this
case because they’d essentially be testing that our shim is functioning
correctly.
I also don’t think we can spin distutils out of the stdlib as long as CPython
depends on it.
I see two paths forward:
1) We come up with something better *in the standard library*, implement it,
move CPython to using that in the build process, and then deprecate/remove
distutils from the stdlib and have it maintained outside.
2) We come up with something better outside of the standard library, implement
it, vendor it into distutils/_whatevercoollib, and turn the relevant distutils
APIs into shims over the new API.
Of the two, I think that (2) is going to be the least painful for users.
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