- there is nothing you can do with pyproject.toml that you can't with setup.cfg. E.G: you are not forced to use setuptools to use setup.cfg. Any tool supporting pyproject.toml could support setup.cfg as easily, since it's a documented plain text format. It's a political decision.
- there are things you can't do with pyproject.toml you can with setup.cfg. E.G: you can't use pyproject.toml with legacy tools, or with just a fresh python setup. This may change in the future, but would requires a lot of effort because changing setuptools is a very tedious process.
- resources (time, people, money, documentation, public attention, communication, etc) invested in creating and supporting pyproject.toml could be invested in improving setup.cfg and its ecosystem support. E.G: Why does poetry support pyproject.toml and not setup.cfg ? No technical reason. Why does nobody knows this easy way to package python libs ? No technical reason reason either.
So not only the new format brings nothing on the table, but it is also a setback, AND add clutter to a situation that was just begining to be solved. It's not just poor engineering, it's poor manners really.
First, it managed to work fine for setuptools for 2 years accross all recent python versions. That's because the differences are minor and edge cases. Try to use pyproject.toml in most CI toolchain just for fun...
Second, the format of setup.cfg is defined in a documentation already, so there is a reference outside of configparser. Yes, the low level format is not explicitly defined (although it is implicitly): so let's do define it instead of creating a new one.
Third, it's still a much easier and saner task to rafine the definition of setup.cfg than to create a new standard. I don't even understand how this is controversial, espacially among people in the computing world, where we had those kind of problems for decades and we know the pros and cons, and consequence of this.
The "I add my little format because it's pure and better and current things suck" falacy is such a stereotype we should all be able to recognize it from miles away from nowaday.
Using pyproject.toml just requires a recent version of pip. Which CI tools can't handle that?
I wouldn't call comments an edge case. The distutils documentation has a definition for comments, but I think it actually just uses configparser. setuptools just uses configparser. The pbr documentation has a slightly different definition, but I wouldn't be surprised if it just uses configparser too.
They also have different definitions of non-string types.
Even if you call those edge cases, do you think a PEP that turned edge cases into silent errors would be approved?
Also the last time I used tox, anything complex didn't work either.
> Even if you call those edge cases, do you think a PEP that turned edge cases into silent errors would be approved?
Well the current PEP decided to turn a packaging situation that was stable into one that was not, again, after 15 years of mess with many versions of things. So you tell me.
Check the usage stats I posted in an other comment to see the problem.
Besides, yes, we do make compromise on best practices to allow peaceful transition all the time in Python. `async/await` allowing to be a variable silently. Non utf8 defaut encoding argument in open() in windows. Then... we fix it later.
Because I think you conveniently skip a lot of things I wrote in my comments. I clearly state that we would and should consider setup.cfg as a version 1 of the format. Then we would increment on that. I gave a detailed procedure on one way to do that, and there are others.
The point is, all your concerned can be addressed with a progressive transition, starting from setup.cfg. Actually we could even end up with a toml format in setup.cfg, __on the long run__, that matches exactly the current one.
While you addressed non of ours concerns. Just reject them. No will to even recognize there is a problem. It's insulting, really.
We did that during the 2/3 transition. Didn't work so well, did it ?
> we should all be able to recognize it from miles away from nowaday.
Oh but we do. Then we rationalize it away, because "this time...". Like we do for Big Rewrites.
It might have something to do with the fact that programming is mostly a craft you learn by doing it, so we overvalue "doing it again" because that's how we usually get better.
- there are things you can't do with pyproject.toml you can with setup.cfg. E.G: you can't use pyproject.toml with legacy tools, or with just a fresh python setup. This may change in the future, but would requires a lot of effort because changing setuptools is a very tedious process.
- resources (time, people, money, documentation, public attention, communication, etc) invested in creating and supporting pyproject.toml could be invested in improving setup.cfg and its ecosystem support. E.G: Why does poetry support pyproject.toml and not setup.cfg ? No technical reason. Why does nobody knows this easy way to package python libs ? No technical reason reason either.
So not only the new format brings nothing on the table, but it is also a setback, AND add clutter to a situation that was just begining to be solved. It's not just poor engineering, it's poor manners really.
I've been coding in Python for 15 years. I've lived this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14753678
Stop the pain.