2009/10/5 Jeff Rush <jeff@taupro.com>:
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.
Well "this major"... It's a bug fix that breaks a setuptools monkey-patch. But yes, it was discovered before release, and maybe it should have been discussed, I'm not on python-dev anymore.
and even hints of under-the-table intentionality in forcing the community to abandon use of setuptools.
There are no such hints anywhere.
Distribute should win because of superior technology not forced migration.
That makes no sense. You move to distribute because you have to, because setuptools is buggy and not updated. Until people encounter bugs in setuptools, or need Python 3 support, they are not likely to move to Distribute. There is no other reason than forced migration. Also, there is no "win" or "lose". This is not a competition.
Distribute is very new and there are many folk who will not be adopting it until it has been out for quite some time.
Nobody will adopt it until they are forced to. This unfortunate bug means people are forced to quicker than expected. I don't think that's an actual problem.
It is a fact of the conservative nature of some development teams.
Conservative development teams are not likely to either use Subversion 1.6 or Python 2.6.3, so they are not affected by any of the major setuptools problems. I would have expected people starting to get forced to Distribute when major distros where shipping with subversion 1.6. Now it's going to be when they ship with Python 2.6.3 instead. I fail to see how this is a big disaster in any way. Yes, it's not perfect, and yeah, maybe there should have been big warning signs somewhere. But we can NOT leave bugs in Python just because setuptools isn't getting updated. Setuptools has already been a break on Python 3 development, are we gonna lets it be a break on Python 2 bugfixes too? -- Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok http://regebro.wordpress.com/ +33 661 58 14 64