======= Roadmap ======= Distribute has two branches: - 0.6.x : provides a Setuptools-0.6cX compatible version - 0.7.x : will provide a refactoring 0.6.x ===== Not "much" is going to happen here, we want this branch to be helpful to the community *today* by addressing the 40-or-so bugs that were found in Setuptools and never fixed. This is eventually happen soon because its development is fast : there are up to 5 commiters that are working on it very often (and the number grows weekly.) The biggest issue with this branch is that it is providing the same packages and modules setuptools does, and this requires some bootstrapping work where we make sure once Distribute is installed, all Distribution that requires Setuptools will continue to work. This is done by faking the metadata of Setuptools 0.6c9. That's the only way we found to do this. There's one major thing though: thanks to the work of Lennart, Alex, Martin, this branch supports Python 3, which is great to have to speed up Py3 adoption. The goal of the 0.6.x is to remove as much bugs as we can, and try if possible to remove the patches done on Distutils. We will support 0.6.x maintenance for years and we will promote its usage everywhere instead of Setuptools. Some new commands are added there, when they are helpful and don't interact with the rest. I am thinking about "upload_docs" that let you upload documentation to PyPI. The goal is to move it to Distutils at some point, if the documentation feature of PyPI stays and starts to be used. 0.7.x ===== We've started to refactor Distribute with this roadmap in mind (and no, as someone said, it's not vaporware, we've done a lot already) - 0.7.x can be installed and used with 0.6.x - easy_install is going to be deprecated ! use Pip ! - the version system will be deprecated, in favor of the one in Distutils - no more Distutils monkey-patch that happens once you use the code (things like 'from distutils import cmd; cmd.Command = CustomCommand') - no more custom site.py (that is: if something misses in Python's site.py we'll add it there instead of patching it) - no more namespaced packages system, if PEP 382 (namespaces package support) makes it to 2.7 - The code is splitted in many packages and might be distributed under several distributions. - distribute.resources: that's the old pkg_resources, but reorganized in clean, pep-8 modules. This package will only contain the query APIs and will focus on being PEP 376 compatible. We will promote its usage and see if Pip wants to use it as a basis. It will probably shrink a lot though, once the stdlib provides PEP 376 support. - distribute.entrypoints: that's the old pkg_resources entry points system, but on its own. it uses distribute.resources - distribute.index: that's package_index and a few other things. everything required to interact with PyPI. We will promote its usage and see if Pip wants to use it as a basis. - distribute.core (might be renamed to main): that's everything else, and uses the other packages. Goal: A first release before (or when) Python 2.7 / 3.2 is out.
