[Zope3-dev] Re: More thoughts on packaging

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:20 AM 2/16/04 -0500, Tres Seaver wrote:
>If we can manage such extensions over distutils, that would be great; we 
>should then nominate them for inclusion at the language level.  If we 
>can't, then that is also OK;  we should be prepared to move forward either way.

The nice thing about distutils is that it *is* well-designed with respect 
to being able to replace its commands.

Alas, it's not always so well-factored when it comes to subclassing its 
built-in commands.  Many commands have a tendency to factor out all the 
easy parts into lots of little methods, and then do the hard parts in 
really huge methods, or a handful of midsize methods that carry a host of 
assumptions between them.  So, to do anything "interesting" with a command 
subclass you end up with lots of code duplication, copying from the 
original implementation so you can change some minor detail in the middle 
of a huge method.

What that means is that we'll probably want to see if we can get patches 
accepted that refactor the base functionality of certain commands for 
easier subclassing, in the event that the extended functionality we want is 
considered out-of-scope or something for distutils itself.