PEP 762 – REPL-acing the default REPL

There's a tremendous power with defaults and with "batteries included".

The same people removed distutils, which is why at my company we had to update several internal C-extensions.

In these decisions the only thing that matters is if Microsoft, Facebook, Bloomberg or one of their employees is pleased.

It looks like a lot of care went in to disclosing this and providing replacements. Can I ask what you were using it for?

https://peps.python.org/pep-0632/

The deprecation of distutils caused a ton of havoc for e.g. FreeCAD

Not the one you are asking, but NumPy literally converted to meson because of the deprecation. There was tons of pain for so many extensions.

This pain generates job security for the bigcorp employees and grief for anyone else.

I won't argue with that, but I would like to understand why.

If I'm on the right path with these forum threads, it looks like there were issues with how Debian packages python?

https://forum.freecad.org/viewtopic.php?t=67985

https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/pull/6753

https://ffy00.github.io/blog/02-python-debian-and-the-instal...

Super helpful, thanks! The NumPy page on the migration has some details on the differences:

    > ... [Here] are the numpy.distutils features that are not present in setuptools:
      * Nested setup.py files
      * Fortran build support
      * BLAS/LAPACK library support (OpenBLAS, MKL, ATLAS, Netlib LAPACK/BLAS, BLIS, 64-bit ILP interface, etc.)
      * Support for a few other scientific libraries, like FFTW and UMFPACK
      * Better MinGW support
      * Per-compiler build flag customization (e.g. -O3 and SSE2 flags are default)
      * a simple user build config system, see site.cfg.example
      * SIMD intrinsics support
      * Support for the NumPy-specific .src templating format for .c/.h files

https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/distutils_status_migr...

I never did understand this. It appears that they were maintaining their own fork of distutils anyway (and if you open up a latest-version wheel today you should still see it included); so why did the standard library removal cause a problem?

>The same people removed distutils

Yes; it's extremely cruft-filled and nobody wanted to / had the skills to keep the standard library version maintained. There's a note in the Setuptools documentation somewhere about how distutils was deemed fundamentally unfixable, and it doesn't come across like the hacks Setuptools was applying on top of distutils were particularly well understood by anyone.

>In these decisions the only thing that matters is if Microsoft, Facebook, Bloomberg or one of their employees is pleased.

I don't think there's good evidence for this, and the current case is certainly not convincing. Why would they want distutils removed - as opposed to that motivation come from the devs who would otherwise be responsible for its bugs?

I don't know the details, all I know is because of that I can't currently install FreeCAD from Fedora repositories which is super annoying, and IMO not the fault of either Fedora or FreeCAD...

Because the "fork" still relied on the presence of the included distutils.

But it's open source. Couldn't they just vendor it? Not like that would noticeably bloat a wheel that's already close to 20 MB on some platforms.