On Jul 13, 2013, at 4:08 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

On 13 July 2013 20:35, Marcus Smith <qwcode@gmail.com> wrote:

The drawbacks of bundling setuptools:
1) maybe some weird bug/side-effect shows up after we do it (ok, maybe that's FUD)

One possible issue is with the "install from sdist" code, which runs Python in a subprocess with the "import setuptools, etc etc" incantation to force always using setuptools. That may break (or at least need changing) for a bundled setuptools, which won't be visible from the top level by default. Worth checking, anyway.

Of course, this code path becomes less important as we move towards installing from wheels, but it's going to be a while before that's the norm.

Paul

PS Apologies if I already said this. I'm losing track of what I've replied to and what I've just thought about on this thread :-(

Pip already wraps that code to force things to use setuptools even if they use distutils. So in that case pip would just need to modify it's own code to add setuptools to sys.modules (or extend sys.path in that sub process).