On 2009-10-13, Michael Whapples <mwhapples@aim.com> wrote:
Hello, I realise I may be starting something I would prefer not to (looking at some of the replies of the announcement of setuptools 0.6c10), so I would like to ask that this tries to stay as a factual thing rather than a "having a go at the other".
As it seems that setuptools is not "dead" just possibly a bit slow at being updated,
Setuptools has effectively been dead for a year. Critical patches were not being applied and there was no hope (till a few days ago) of ever getting them fixed. This goes way beyond "a bit slow at being updated".
could I ask what are the aims of the various projects setuptools and distribute (please try and keep this information restricted to your project and what it aims to do)?
Setuptools being completely dead (till a few days ago), distribute's aim was basically just to have a working setuptools. So: no differences, except that patches have been applied (and iirc one useful non-intrusive addition of being able to upload sphinx docs to pypi).
It would be nice to have this information as at the moment its a bit unclear what either really are trying to offer over the other. I would like to be able to make a fully informed choice on why use one over the other, I feel at the moment this isn't possible.
Technically both are the same (not looking at the bugfixes). The choice is between open source development and project management styles: PJE's setuptools and Tarek-and-a-lot-of-other-people's distribute.
I have to say from my view (as a developer of my own packages only using setuptools/distribute to help package my packages) that it currently looks a horrible mess, distribute tries to replace setuptools and does it in such a way that any package which specifically wants setuptools has to use distribute if another package wants it, so not allowing the one which specifically wants setuptools to get the latest setuptools (eg. now or soon it will be setuptools 0.6c10).
For a globally installed setuptools or distribute: yes, that's a mess. When you use buildout (or pip, apparently) to manage a per-project isolated set of eggs, they will happily coexist (once the 0.6.5 is out with a small fix). So it also depends a bit on the way you set up your project. Reinout -- Reinout van Rees - reinout@vanrees.org - http://reinout.vanrees.org Software developer at http://www.thehealthagency.com "Military engineers build missiles. Civil engineers build targets"