In late March, version 78.0.1 of Setuptools — an important Python packaging tool — was released [...]

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.

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    2·
    1 day ago

    Historically, hyphens and underscores were treated as equivalent in the names of keys appearing in the file

    This is why I strongly prefer underscores; never use hyphens if you can avoid it. Eventually the names will end up as variables in a programming language where you have to use underscores, and now you’ve got some stupid and confusing translation system to deal with.

    Another example of this is CSS names in Javascript. Rust also made this mistake unfortunately.

    This [key name in setup.cfg] has been deprecated in 2021.

    I knew Python didn’t take backwards compatibility seriously after Python 3.12, but 4 years is a joke.