distutils2 may have died. The idea of declarative package metadata hasn't (although it may not have advanced as quickly as you might like). There is a PEP[1] (which is sadly not yet implemented[2]) which a) starts to move some metadata into declarative format b) is designed to allow implementation of alternative build systems that have more declarative metadata.
[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0518/ [2] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/3691
Re:Python packaging is good now
by galacticpony on Sunday August 14, 2016 @12:12PM
(#12286126)
Maybe I'm a bit too old-fashioned, but you should always assume that any program you run will delete your home directory with a probability > 0.
If you're not prepared for that situation at all times, you are using computers wrong.
It's bad enough that I have a boilerplate `setup.py` that just does `import ConfigParser` and blasts the entire `[setup.py]` section into `setuptools.setup()` as `kwargs`. I copy and paste this boilerplate into every new project that I start.
Oh and while we're ranting about Python packaging, let me rant about tox, which is so-very-useful but also so-very-dangerous: IF YOU (SLIGHTLY) MISCONFIGURE YOUR TOX.INI FILE, IT WILL DELETE YOUR ENTIRE PROJECT DIRECTORY! [1]
I suppose I am getting too old and cranky for this stuff. :)
[1] https://bitbucket.org/hpk42/tox/issues/352/tox-deleted-all-o...