Wrap up of the distutils2 paris' sprint
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:date: 2011-02-08
:category: tech

Finally, thanks to a bunch of people that helped me to pay my train and bus
tickets, I've made it to paris for the distutils2 sprint.

They have been a bit more than 10 people to come during the sprint, and it was
very productive. Here's a taste of what we've been working on:

* the `datafiles`, a way to specify and to handle the installation of files which
  are not python-related (pictures, manpages and so on).
* `mkgcfg`, a tool to help you to create a setup.cfg in minutes (and with funny
  examples)
* converters from setup.py scripts. We do now have a piece of code which
  reads your current `setup.py` file and fill in some fields in the `setup.cfg`
  for you.
* a compatibility layer for distutils1, so it can read the `setup.cfg` you will
  wrote for distutils2 :-)
* the uninstaller, so it's now possible to uninstall what have been installed
  by distutils2 (see PEP 376)
* the installer, and the setuptools compatibility layer, which will allow you
  to rely on setuptools' based distributions (and there are plenty of them!)
* The compilers, so they are more flexible than they were. Since that's an
  obscure part of the code for distutils2 commiters (it comes directly from the
  distutils1 ages), having some guys who understood the problematics here was
  a must.

Some people have also tried to port their packaging from distutils1 to
distutils2. They have spotted a number of bugs and made some improvements
to the code, to make it more friendly to use.

I'm really pleased to see how newcomers went trough the code, and started
hacking so fast. I must say it wasn't the case when we started to work on
distutils1 so that's a very good point: people now can hack the code quicker
than they could before.

Some of the features here are not *completely* finished yet, but are on the
tubes, and will be ready for a release (hopefully) at the end of the week.

Big thanks to logilab for hosting (and sponsoring my train ticket) and
providing us food, and to bearstech for providing some money for breakfast and
bears^Wbeers.

Again, a big thanks to all the people who gave me money to pay the transport,
I really wasn't expecting such thing to happen :-)
