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 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).