The summit

I quickly posted an entry right after the Language Summit we held before Pycon in Atlanta. Basically, all the work I have being doing in Distutils and the PEPs we’ve prepared for the “big refactoring” will not be done in the standard library. Distutils in the stdlib trunk will be reverted to its current 2.6.x state.

I was quite despaired right after the summit. All the work we did during in the past year would not land into the standard library for 2.7, and all the pre- refactoring work I did, like making the test coverage decent, was going to be useless for the stdlib. Having that work included in 2.7 was one of my goal and I worked hard on making sure most of the important PEPs would be accepted before the feature freeze for 2.7 happened (the first beta, freezing new features, is in 4 weeks.)

I was even more depressed because I started to pull out of Distutils the “sysconfig” module and simplified the code in distutils, while making sure that the backward compatibility was kept.

I had a twenty minutes meeting with Guido after the Summit to clarify the situation and he helped me understand why this was the right path and worked with me on what to do next in the stdlib front and outside the stdlib.

Basically, a package that comes in the standard library has a foot in the grave (I am paraphrasing Guido here.). Its APIs is frozen, and people don’t really expect nothing from it, but small new features and bug fixes. Refactorings are dangerous, if not impossible.

I have hit that problem in the past, in one of the 2.6 bug fix release, where I broke Setuptools compatibility because of an internal change I have made in a private method. The breakage was partly because Setuptools overrides a private method and partly because a public method that was not clearly documented was affected.

A few weeks ago the problem happened again : someone complained on python-dev because a declaration (an exception class) was missing from Distutils. An exception class was imported from the errors module into another Distutils module, but not used anymore there. And the module it was imported in didn’t have an __all__ attribute. A third-party tool was importing the exception from the wrong module, so when I cleaned it up the third party module was broken.

So basically, any change I make in Distutils, even a simple cleaning, and worse, even a private method change, potentially breaks third-party tools.

You could argue that they should be careful in how they use Distutils, and never patch it or change its internal etc., and for edge cases like missing imports, just fix them.

But hey, Python 2.7 is out of the door in five weeks, and the user experience will be that Python has broken third-party libraries.

And the worse part of it : some of these libraries like Setuptools are not really maintained anymore and expect Distutils not to evolve anymore. But Setuptools is used nevertheless since it solves some problems Distutils doesn’t. So the end user is the one that will suffer from those regressions.

In other words, project like Setuptools slows down the work we want to do in packaging because the current eco-system depends on a big, monolithic, messy pile of code that is located in different projects with different maintainers.

At this point, I understood that the easiest way for Distutils to evolve was to get away from this pile and grow on another namespace called distutils2.

Welcome Distutils2

If you have followed what is going on with packaging since last year, you might think: “distutils, setuptools, distribute and now distutils2 ?, oh no!!!”

But that is going to be for the benefit of everyone. See the roadmap in image below.

So basically, I have forked Distutils and renamed its package into Distutils2. The project is located in http://hg.python.org/distutils2 and the goal is to put it back into the standard library as soon as it reaches a state where it starts to be used by the community. Distutils will just die slowly, probably pulling Setuptools and Distribute with it.

The Distribute project is still important because it can help us releasing bug fixes or Python 3 support things today.

Distutils2 will be 2.4 to 3.2 compatible and will get back from Distribute the good bits and implement the PEPs that were accepted lately PEP 345 and PEP 386.

And I am happily removing old code we don’t want/need anymore without worrying about backward compatibility. Yeah !

The packaging sprint

After the conferences, we started a packaging sprint and I was surprised because many people showed up and worked on the topic.

We created a few teams to work on PEP 376, mkpkg, the Hitchicker’s Guide to Packaging (HHGP), and Distribute. I won’t say the name of each person, I am too scared to forget someone :D.

PEP 376

Like last year, people from various distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian) and I worked on packaging issues. They worked on PEP 386 last year mainly (the versioning scheme) and focused on PEP 376 this year. This PEP is about setting up a standard for installed packages, and an installation index that allows to query what packages are installed, and get their metadata. In extend, it provides an uninstall feature. The goal is to have a standard for all package managers of course.

One part of the PEP is about describing the data files that are installed with the project (like configuration files or documentation) so they can be removed and maybe relocated. The group focused on describing the files a project contains in a static way (in setup.cfg) with variables that can be expanded an installation time (which values are provided by Python, but globally configurable by the OS packagers.)

We did quite some work and brainstorming on this, and even focused on removing setup.py ! A fully static description of a project (metadata+file list) is the key to a better packaging tool !

Expect a proposal soon on distutils-SIG, for PEP 376. If you want to have a look, the draft proposal is here: draft.

mkpkg and Distribute

We had two one-member teams at some point, so I can name them without being scared of forgetting someone 😉

Sean worked on a nice add-on for Distutils2, a script that builds a setup.py file after asking you a few questions. He blogged about it. so I don’t need to get into further details 🙂

Noufal worked on fixing some bugs in Distribute. We should do a release at some point.

The HitchHicker’s Guide to Packaging

Another group worked on the guide. The goal is to provide some help for people that want to package things today and are despaired with the sparse documentation they can find. Which tool to use ? how ? when ?

The work done was quite amazing, look at it : http://guide.python-distribute.org

I have spoken with Georg Brandl to see how we could move it to docs.python.org and make it grow there.

Distutils2 coding

Besides PEP 345, I worked on making Distutils2 work for 2.2, 2.5, 2.6 and this is now over. I have also almost fully implemented PEP 345 in there.

There’s now a metadata module with a dict-like DistributionMetadata class that knows how to read and write PKG-INFO files. It also knows how to interpret the micro-language we’ve defined: the environment markers.

Last, I’ve added the PEP 386 version module : version.py. This one is used now by the metadata class to control versions.

More to come !

Next sprint at Confoo.ca

The next packaging sprint will happen in Montreal, where I am going as a speaker next week. We will continue the worked started, so stay tuned.