Lennart Regebro wrote:
2009/10/3 Ned Deily <nad@acm.org>:
This is not a good experience for users. Unless I'm missing something (and I hope I am), this issue really can't be hand-waved away.
It's unfortunate that this comes in a minor release.
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.
But at the same time we can hardly avoid fixing bugs just because setuptools isn't getting updated at the moment. It's a lose-lose situation.
Setuptools is hardly a minor software tool. Considering that setuptools is a major focus and key technology of this group, those making changes to distutils should have tested against setuptools and devised a solution providing backward compatibility, along with deprecation warnings. Lennart and Tarek, I know you at least are familiar with this valuable practice in Zope for years. At the least, those making changes to Distutils should, after testing against Setuptools, widely announced this was coming. It does not reflect positively on the Distribute team and even hints of under-the-table intentionality in forcing the community to abandon use of setuptools. Distribute should win because of superior technology not forced migration.
As I see it this will speed up adaptation of Distribute. Word will spread. It's not ideal, but then it's not a perfect world.
Distribute is very new and there are many folk who will not be adopting it until it has been out for quite some time. It is a fact of the conservative nature of some development teams. If setuptools were an optional, little-used technology in Python it would not be a big deal but it isn't. It is not appropriate to -force- users to adopt a particular branch of a fork, except perhaps in the move from Python 2.x to 3.x where major changes are anticipated and there was no setuptools for 3.x anyway. 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. -Jeff