On Thu, 8 Oct 2009 21:41:21 +0000 (UTC), Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > I think it's quite trivial actually. Since everybody agrees (except perhaps > PJE) > that Distribute should replace setuptools, the word will spread and trickle > quite quickly in the various layers of the community.
I don't think that it's that black and white. PJE put a lot of work (and creativity) into setuptools. There's some degree of tragedy if his project gets forked off simply because of failures in the testing and quality assurance department. Personally, I find the setuptools code somewhat hard to follow. The style goes back to early programming by 'masters' where the only person that could follow it was the master himself. Sadly, that is not what we need in open source. The newer trend is in highly readily readable and easy to understand code. Tarek is excellent at producing high quality code of the type that is required. But his programming world (on the mac) isn't full of the challenges that we poor other unfortunates face on other platforms face. Coming back to the point, setuptools is a pretty poor package to have to fork. It's very difficult to follow and the structure and implementation is cryptic. Perphaps it's a thankless job that Tarek has taken on in that regard - but he seems to be handling the distribute fork quite well. Being new to python, it's taken me a little while to figure out the process. But I've decided to write a static metadata pep which is underway now as an alternate proposal. Being primarily a hacker, writing nice design documents doesn't come easy. If there is any distutils roadmap, I'd like to see improvements that work on Windows. Yes.. python does work on windows and we can't all get our bosses to change to os-x just yet. There's many things in distutils that I could best describe as being unfinished or partially done. Let me make a few rambling direction suggestions... - command line package installation for distutils We need a simple script, not based on setuptools to allow installation, listing and deinstallation of packages. Currently *nothing* exists in distutils to do this. It's a **major** failing. - Improvements to operation on platform Windows Package/Application installation on windows sucks... For example, there's no documented way to get your programs installed to "\Program Files\myApplication" For non windows users, that's where programs are supposed to go. Any other place is "evil" - like where they are going now. If it is only a documentation issue, well can we fix that. All I'm asking for is a matching "elif sys.platform = 'win32'" for every "if sys.platform = 'darwin'".... or less. It's not unreasonable... It's probably a sensible idea for Tarek to keep going with Distribute. My user experience with setuptools was that it wasted a lot of my time unnecessarily. I'm planning to put Distribute support in the Python Package Manager project (pythonpkgmgr) for it's next release. David _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com