
At 01:32 PM 9/24/2008 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
Hi,
I am launching a fork of setuptools. The name is "Distribute". (not definitive) and will be community-driven
This fork will remain 100% compatible with setuptools, and follow closely setuptools evolutions.
Unfortunately, the only way you can remain 100% compatible with code "in the field" is by calling your distribution "setuptools" also, or by having it also install a dummy setuptools egg or at least .egg-info. Otherwise, packages that declare a dependency to a specific setuptools version will cause it to be installed, thereby overwriting your package. There's also setup scripts that use ez_setup, which you could work around for easy_install scenarios with clever enough monkeypatching, but someone directly running a setup script would still break. If you're going to attempt this, I would consider very carefully how you will address these issues, as it seems to me that it would be very easy for someone to silently hose their system this way, and possibly quite difficult to find out what went wrong or how to fix it.