[longlivebooks]

Sad to see distutils going away. I have very old projects which use distutils for distribution. Wrote them in Python 2 days and they were ported easily to Python 3. But distutils going away is going to break them.

I know setuptools is advanced and recommended but distutils worked fine for me and my users for so many years. It is going to be overhead for me to comb through all my projects and replace distutils with setuptools, test them and testing out packaging and distribution is quite a lot of work.

I am growing unhappy with Python due to these breakages. Is there some other programming language whose maintainers don't break the "user space" like Python has been doing time and again?

[ketzu]

Good news for you:

> For projects still using distutils and cannot be updated to something else, the setuptools project can be installed: it still provides distutils.

From: https://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/3.12.html#removed

[guggle]

> other programming language whose maintainers don't break the "user space"

I think Go qualifies here. (but it's still much younger than Python).

[rwmj]

A warning that while there's something called sysconfig that replaces distutils.sysconfig, it is not compatible:

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/commit/26940f64a740...

[freedomben]

I've been pretty happy with Ruby. I don't ever recall changing my ruby scripts for a new release (whereas with Python it's been many times). Rails is a different story although rails is not ruby. Ruby is similar enough to python that most pythonistas can already read it, so learning effort is mainly just the API differences.