At 02:22 PM 10/5/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
Setuptools development has been discontinued for a year, and does patches on Distutils code. Some of these patches are sensitive to any change made on Distutils, wether those changes are internal or not.
Setuptools is also not the only thing out there that subclasses distutils commands in general, or the build_ext command in particular. Numpy, Twisted, the mx extensions... there are plenty of things out there that subclass distutils commands, quite in adherence to the rules. (Note too that subclassing != patching, and the ability to subclass and substitute distutils commands is documented.) It's therefore not appropriate to treat the issue as if it were setuptools-specific; it could have broken any other major (or minor) package's subclassing of the build_ext command.