On 1 April 2014 21:16, Michael Merickel
Yeah, setuptools is a bw-compat wrapper around distutils, so it tends to only document its new features. This approach to documentation makes it very difficult to understand for newcomers that are not familiar with distutils. Especially now that setuptools is the de facto standard that everyone is learning how to use.
Agreed. The packaging documentation grew piecemeal over time, staring from a basis of the distutils documentation which was itself pretty incomprehensible. We're working on a new iteration of the packaging documentation at https://python-packaging-user-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ but to be honest, it's very easy to take for granted a lot of basics, simply because the people doing the writing are too close to the packaging ecosystem. For example, I don't think anyone considered documenting a single Python module as mentioned by the OP (it's usually the case that your needs very soon grow to the point where a single module isn't enough, but that's not a reason to not cover it - just a possible reason why we never thought of it). We'd be very grateful for any contributions to the packaging user guide, either in the form of pull requests or even just issues on the tracker pointing at things we should cover (or should cover better). Paul