I am taking a break for a week starting tomorrow morning. My wife made it clear : my laptop and internet are totally forbidden during 7 days. So I thought it was a good opportunity to make a status of all the projects that are going on in the packaging world.

[][]Distribute

The setuptools fork is doing good. We've discussed the roadmap strategy with some people at Distutils-SIG and came up with that plan:

0.6 will be released the first week of August. It will support Python 2.x only and will provide a bootstrap to replace an existing version of setuptools, as described in my previous entry.

0.7 will support Python 2.x and 3.x and will refactor the code in three distributions. It will also rename all parts under new names, so they will not compete anymore with setuptools. Its development will start right after 0.6 is out. If you have ideas or feature requests, please add them in our issue tracker at bitbucket.

Distutils

They are some patches waiting for my attention, I need to work on when I am back. But globally, if you open Distutils code, you will notice that it has been PEP8-fied (besides a few places I need to finishe) and test covered.

Some small refactorings have been done, like removing duplicate code and using the tar module of the stdlib instead of the tar command on the system, thus allowing building tar archive under win32 without having to install the tar program for example. Another nice change was done on the upload command: it uses urllib2 now, meaning that you can use an http proxy with a environment variable transparently. Other changes are on their way, like fixing the mess with "compiler" option, and cleaning up some remaining duplicate behaviors.

But nothing is deeply changing yet on how Distutils works. It waits for the PEPs we are working on to be accepted...

PEP 376

After I thaught this PEP was ready to be accepted, I sent it from Distutils-SIG to Python-dev. Then we had very long threads on Python-dev about it, showing that it was not ready at all...

Man, I don't think I've picked the easiest topic ;)

Anyways, people gave a lot of thaught on the topic, and Paul Moore helped building a PEP 302-compatible version of the prototype, you can see at bickbucket. From there, we still need to fix the problem of the absolute/relative paths in the RECORD file, and try to have real world uses cases, with various package managers applications. But we will eventually have an acceptable PEP, I hope, within a few months.

This pep will add query APIs in pkgutils in the stdlib, so you know what's installed in your Python. It will also provide tools to uninstall installed ditributions.

It's a hot topic because we are dealing with the fuzzy boundary between Python the extendable language, where you can install distributions using distutils-based tools, and Python the interpreter, that gets extended with packages managed by an OS-based package manager like APT under Debian for example. So for the latter, all our tool are getting too much in the way and should not make it hard for system packagers to extract the metadata they need to re-package distutils-based distributions.

PEP 386

Man, this PEP would make our life easier. It's all the work we started during Pycon, to find an acceptable way to compare versions. By acceptable I mean that could be used in our community and workable by OS packagers. I said I would drop it, because there were too much controversy, but quite a few people would like to see it accepted.

I doubt Guido will accept a PEP that would enforce a version scheme though.

I had created this PEP, so we could move forward on PEP 345, where we want to introduce "install_requires", the field used in setuptools to list dependencies.

The prototype for PEP 386 is in bitbucket too : verlib

Whatever happens, I'll probably publish it. Its useful to build a package system, and it has a function to translate most distutils/setuptools version schemes.

Now about my addiction

I know that sounds stupid, but I don't know what is going to happen next week. It's been years since I've not been fully offline for a week. I already have right now so many threads to catch up on various mailing lists that I am scared of how it's going to be in 7 days...

But it's probably a good thing for me to do this :)

I am off, see you in 7 days !

[]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9009139@N08/1068561077/sizes/o/