[Distutils] wanted: a catalog of setuptools plugins

[zooko]

Folks:

The setuptools plugins architecture may eventually supplant Makefiles  
in my projects.  It's very nice that people can re-use other people's  
development hacks as packages containing setuptools plugins instead  
of by cutting and pasting snippets of code into their Makefiles.  It  
would be nice if I could find a listing of such plugins that I might  
want to use in my own development.

Here is a list of setuptools plugins that I just found by browsing  
the Python Package Index:

setuptools_bzr, setuptools_darcs, setuptools_mtn, setuptools_qt4,  
darcsver, eggchecker, iw.releaser, apydia, bbfreeze (oh I wish I had  
known about bbfreeze a month ago!), py2app, mkcode, eggtestinfo,  
easydeb, buildutils, hg.setuptools, setuptools-git

Here is one that I wish someone would convert into a plugin (it runs  
unit tests using Twisted's "trial" unit test framework):

https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/browser/trunk/setup.py

So my question is: how can we make it easier for people to find  
these?  I was unaware of most of these until just now and there are  
probably other useful plugins that I'm still unaware of.

One idea that I had was to run a query on the Python Package Index  
database to find all packages whose setup.py's define entry points in  
the "distutils.commands" group name.

Another was to put the word out (i.e. in the setuptools  
documentation) that if your package is a setuptools plugin, that you  
should name your package "setuptools_blah_blah" and register it on  
the Python Package Index.

Regards,

Zooko

P.S.  Here is the trac ticket where the allmydata.org project is  
discussing moving more of our build infrastructure into setuptools  
plugins:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/179 -- "rewrite our Makefile  
in Python instead of GNUmake"