On Fri, Sep 4, 2020 at 11:02 AM Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > While I agree with the general suggestion of deprecating distutils as a > publicly-visible module (in favour of encouraging users to rely on > setuptools), it seems to me that the argument of facilitating the > development of third-party build systems is what already encouraged the > official policy of not adding features to distutils (more than 10 > years ago, IIRC).
My recollection is that we decided to stop changing distutils because too many 3rd party extensions (often included directly in the packages that needed them) using undocumented parts fo distutils directly (since there was no substantially documented API for distutils in the beginning). Every time anything changed, something was broken for somebody. Since that affected not only the developers hooking in to distutils but the users of their packages, touching distutils caused too much pain. -Fred -- Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fred at fdrake.net> "A storm broke loose in my mind." --Albert Einstein _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list -- python-dev@python.org To unsubscribe send an email to python-dev-le...@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-dev.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/message/6SO72DJWM7F77FFWGMIHCD2IWRMD5JAP/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/