At 10:33 PM 11/25/2008 +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
Phillip J. Eby wrote:
Personally, I'm just as bitter about people who insist on thinking that their use cases are the only ones that exist, and seem to wilfully ignore my repeated explanations of what groups of people will be hurt by their "fixes".
It has nothing to do with what group of people are hurt; setuptools breaks standard behavior of python. If every developer took the same approach, and decided to "fix" their bug reports by breaking the general system behavior, I am sure you would be annoyed by it too.
My point is that people offering "fixes" for setuptools need to take into account those other use cases, or else the improvement for one group comes at the expense of another. For example, in this case, if someone wanted to offer a patch that changed the behavior in such a way that the added eggs came directly before the sys.path directory in which they were contained, but not pushed all the way to the beginning of sys.path, that would be an acceptable way to change the behavior. Alternatively, if someone wanted to come up with a more sophisticated conflict resolution method for handling non-setuptools-installed packages, that might work also. There indeed might be a great many ways to resolve the issue -- but nobody's proposing anything except breaking someone else's use cases for their personal convenience. And I say "personal convenience", because easy_install *does* provide an option to not mess with sys.path. If you use --multi-version to install your eggs, easy_install will NOT affect sys.path in ANY way. So it's not like there isn't already a way for easy_install to be "pure" here.