[Distutils] patch: solving the two major things that people dislike about setuptools, part 1

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:33 PM 11/25/2008 +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
>Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> > Personally, I'm just as bitter about people who insist on thinking
> > that their use cases are the only ones that exist, and seem to
> > wilfully ignore my repeated explanations of what groups of people will
> > be hurt by their "fixes".
>
>It has nothing to do with what group of people are hurt; setuptools
>breaks standard behavior of python. If every developer took the same
>approach, and decided to "fix" their bug reports by breaking the general
>system behavior, I am sure you would be annoyed by it too.

My point is that people offering "fixes" for setuptools need to take 
into account those other use cases, or else the improvement for one 
group comes at the expense of another.

For example, in this case, if someone wanted to offer a patch that 
changed the behavior in such a way that the added eggs came directly 
before the sys.path directory in which they were contained, but not 
pushed all the way to the beginning of sys.path, that would be an 
acceptable way to change the behavior.

Alternatively, if someone wanted to come up with a more sophisticated 
conflict resolution method for handling non-setuptools-installed 
packages, that might work also.

There indeed might be a great many ways to resolve the issue -- but 
nobody's proposing anything except breaking someone else's use cases 
for their personal convenience.

And I say "personal convenience", because easy_install *does* provide 
an option to not mess with sys.path.  If you use --multi-version to 
install your eggs, easy_install will NOT affect sys.path in ANY 
way.  So it's not like there isn't already a way for easy_install to 
be "pure" here.