[Python-Dev] Package install failures in 2.6.3

[David Cournapeau]

2009/10/6 P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com>:
> At 02:22 PM 10/5/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>>
>> Setuptools development has been discontinued for a year, and does
>> patches on Distutils code. Some of these patches are sensitive to any
>> change
>> made on Distutils, wether those changes are internal or not.
>
> Setuptools is  also not the only thing out there that subclasses distutils
> commands in general, or the build_ext command in particular.  Numpy,
> Twisted, the mx extensions...  there are plenty of things out there that
> subclass distutils commands, quite in adherence to the rules.  (Note too
> that subclassing != patching, and the ability to subclass and substitute
> distutils commands is documented.)
>
> It's therefore not appropriate to treat the issue as if it were
> setuptools-specific; it could have broken any other major (or minor)
> package's subclassing of the build_ext command.

The internal vs published API difference does not make much sense in
distutils case anyway, since a lot of implementation details are
necessary to make non trivial extension work.

When working on numpy.distutils, I almost always have to look at
distutils sources since the docs are vastly insufficient, and even
then, the code is so bad that quite often the only way to interact
with distutils is to "reverse engineer" its behavior by trial and
error.

cheers,

David