On 06/21/2012 04:45 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:

On Thu, Jun 21, 2012 at 2:44 PM, Chris McDonough<chrism@plope.com>  wrote:

All of these are really pretty minor issues compared with the main benefit
of not needing to ship everything with everything else. The killer feature
is that developers can specify dependencies and users can have those
dependencies installed automatically in a cross-platform way.  Everything
else is complete noise if this use case is not served.

Cool. This is the kind of thing we need recorded in a PEP - there's a
lot of domain knowledge floating around in the heads of packaging
folks that needs to be captured so we can know *what the addition of
packaging to the standard library is intended to fix*.

And, like it or not, setuptools has a serious PR problem due to the
fact it monkeypatches the standard library, uses *.pth files to alter
sys.path for every installed application by default, actually *uses*
the ability to run code in *.pth files and has hard to follow
documentation to boot. I *don't* trust that I fully understand the
import system on any machine with setuptools installed, because it is
demonstrably happy to install state to the file system that will
affect *all* Python programs running on the machine.

I don't know about Red Hat but both Ubuntu and Apple put all kinds of stuff on the default sys.path of the system Python of the box that's related to their software's concerns only.  I don't understand why people accept this but get crazy about the fact that installing a setuptools distribution using easy_install changes the default sys.path.