On 11.05.2015 23:50, Paul Moore wrote:
> 
> I agree with Steve, we shouldn't be constrained to preserve all the undocumented internals of distutils - doing that in the past is what has made distutils essentially unmaintainable.
> 
> I don't think there's a concrete example of real code that will be broken by this change - if I follow the comments correctly, MAL's code will still work ("I guess we'll then just continue to override the .initialize() call"). Without a specific breakage that can't be fixed to work with the new code, I don't think this patch should be blocked just because people might be using the old internals.

This is not about our code. We can work around all this.

The point is that in general, we don't break things in Python just
because we can, even if we don't need to.

In this case, I don't see a need to break things to add support for
a new compiler version, which is why I don't follow Steve's arguments.