hi! I am really confused about all the setuptools/distutils/distribute/distutils2/easy_install/pip situation, but still have a little frustration about writing your own command for python setup.py your_command_name.

Right now, for example, babel package provides it's command::

python setup.py extract_messages

To do that, the part::

[distutils.commands] extract_messages = babel.messages.frontend:extract_messages

is ok, but what I dislike is the whole::

from distutils.cmd import Command

class extract_messages(Command): # provide user_options and 3 more function implementations in here pass

thing. I find it really implicit.

I mean, how do I run the command extract_messages from python? Maybe implementation of command should be that it can be called from regular python code like::

extract_messages(my_custom_kwargs=here)

?