[Distutils] Package install failures in 2.6.3 - setuptools vs Distribute

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Oct 5, 2009, at 5:40 AM, Jeff Rush wrote:
>
>> Very unfortunate, as in, it should NOT have happened.  And *especially*
>> without any announcement on python.org or mention on the
>> python-committers list of something this major.
>
> [...]
>
>> Considering that 2.6.3 is messed up in other ways, like displaying the
>> SVN rc1 tag and a broken logging module, and probably will be
>> re-released at 2.6.4 very shortly, perhaps we can get this -at least-
>> into the Python docs and maybe introduce backward compatible hooks into
>> distutils to support setuptools.
>
> I apologize for my part in this, but moving forward I think that if it's
> possible to patch and release a setuptools that works with Python 2.6.3
> /and/ earlier Python 2.6.x's, then that should happen asap.  If that's not
> possible, then we might need to revert the distutils change in a quick
> Python 2.6.4.

It's technically possible to fix Setuptools. We did this fix on Distribute, and
the patch is 2 lines long.

But it's just a matter of having the maintainer doing it. A few months ago we
couldn't make him fix and release the bug that made setuptools fail
with svn 1.6,
and the year before it took several months to get it fixed for svn 1.5
(a one line, not risky change !!!)

That's why we have forked and created Distribute, to provide bug fixes.

If PJE is not concerned anymore by the maintenance, imho he should let someone
that is willing to do it take over the maintenance of his package to
fix this (and the other problems).
That is not a new problem.

Beware that I don't want to run in any new vicious thread here: I had
my share of those.

So about taking over Setuptools maintenance :
1/ I am not saying it should be me, and I am not saying that I am
offended that PJE didn't open the maintenance of setuptools to me.  I
think he should trust the community and let the maintenance of
setuptools be done by all the people that are actively working on the topic.

2/ No, as someone told me in IRC, that's not an evil plan of mine to
make people switch to Distribute. This
is not in our interest, it's a loss-loss situation.

Now I am strongly opposed to revert any bug fix change in Distutils
just because it breaks Setuptools, which is unmaintained since a year.

We have been struggling over a year with this issue. And we are still
struggling because we have
to work in a fork to try to provide solutions for the community, with
a lot of bootstrapping issues.

Now I am astonished that we are talking about reverting changes in
Distutils that were done for bugfixes,
for a third party package that does monkey patches on Distutils.

If this choice wins here, it means that setuptools and the stdlib are
tied together, and that the setuptools package should be integrated to
the stdlib *immediatly*.


Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org | オープンソースはすごい! | 开源传万世，因有你参与