Discussing a breaking change in Python’s setuptools.
The really interesting part is in the discussion section… and it shows once more how incredibly well-designed the GNU Guix package manager is – which solves these problems very very well, for arbitrary languages and with a fast growing distribution of, by now, about 50,000 packages.
I’ve seen good devs, helped by the team of guix themselves, fail for weeks and weeks at making it work as intended. That’s not a working software.
So, what exactly were they trying to do?
I don’t remember exactly, they were trying to package some dependencies they needed with guix and it was just a big headache.
So, how many users of Debian would even think about creating own packages?
I already have a hunch what went wrong: they were probably trying to package software that has no standard build system. This is painful because the standard tools, like GNU autotools for C programs, or cmake, or setuptools or its newer siblings for python, make sure that the right commands are used to build a package on whatever platform, and that, importantly, its components are installed into the right places. If they don’t use these, they will have a problem to build packages for any standard distribution.
Guix has support for all the mayor build systems (otherwise, it could not support building of 50000 packages).