On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Chris Withers wrote:

Guido van Rossum wrote:

...

I'm saying that I don't expect setuptools 0.7 to appear before Tarek's Distribute is mature and in widespread use. IOW I support Tarek's fork and suggest nobody hold their breath waiting for setuptools 0.7.

Well, if this was the BDFL pronouncement that a lot of people have taken it to be, does that allow Martin von Lewis to give the keys to http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools to the "distribute" developers, so we can get on and use the original "setuptools" name without all the confusion and hackery needed to make "distribute" work?

I am -1 on this. At Python and PyPI level, 'Setuptools' is PJE's project and he's the one that manages the list of users that have extended rights on his project. In Distribute, our setup.py script makes sure setuptools is not in the way. It is explicit and documented, and there's a documentation explaining how to switch back to Setuptools. This exists only because there's no way yet in Python to say that a distribution can't run when another distribution is installed. But it's up to every project and developer to choose to switch to Distribute. And it's up to OS packagers to choose the best strategy at their levels when they package tools for their packaging system (so they pick one or the other and they are able to make a distinction between PJE python distribution and ours) Distribute developers will of course promote Distutils usage everywhere, but hijacking setuptools in PyPI would be a very bad thing imho. Tarek

Chris Withers writes:

*sigh* I don't see it as hijacking, provided Guido is making a BDFL pronouncement that you're maintaining this software

Well, what you are proposing *is* hijacking. PJE is not paid or employed by Guido, he is the full author of setuptools. Forking is of course fine (this is free software), but saying "I overthrow you as the maintainer of this software" is not. While you (and I) may be unsatisfied with PJE's maintenance style, personal (dis)affection should not be what motivates our decisions. A piece of software has an author who has some moral rights on it, and should be treated with respect. After all, when an author decides to release code under a free license, it shows a fair amount of trust and respect towards the user; it is only fair that the user shows the same amount of trust and respect (*). (*) it has happened that some users don't, and in that case the author's reaction can be violent. For example, Nessus became proprietary: http://news.cnet.com/Nessus-security-tool-closes-its-source/2100-7344_3-5890... Regards Antoine.

Chris Withers writes:

Well, if this was the BDFL pronouncement that a lot of people have taken it to be, does that allow Martin von Lewis to give the keys to http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools to the "distribute" developers, so we can get on and use the original "setuptools" name without all the confusion and hackery needed to make "distribute" work?

Er, perhaps this is a bit brutal? I don't think the BDFL has a right of life and death over third-party packages. I mean, we're an anarcho-syndicalist commune, aren't we? WOMAN: Who are the Britons? ARTHUR: Well, we all are. we're all Britons and I am your king. WOMAN: I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective. DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship. A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes-- [snip] Regards Antoine. PS :

PS: I had thought that MvL couldn't help because of ez_setup.py, but it's only buildout that appears foolish enough to have a hardcoded download of:

Some projects also have an SVN "externals" pointing to the setuptools SVN repository, as described here: http://peak.telecommunity.com/doc/ez_setup/index.html

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Georg Brandl wrote:

Chris Withers schrieb:

...

Guido van Rossum wrote:

...

I'm saying that I don't expect setuptools 0.7 to appear before Tarek's Distribute is mature and in widespread use. IOW I support Tarek's fork and suggest nobody hold their breath waiting for setuptools 0.7.

Well, if this was the BDFL pronouncement that a lot of people have taken it to be, does that allow Martin von Lewis to give the keys to http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools to the "distribute" developers, so we can get on and use the original "setuptools" name without all the confusion and hackery needed to make "distribute" work?

That's absurd.  There's a certain area where Guido can make pronouncements, but third-party packages is not it.  Even if they're hosted on python.org infrastructure.

Right. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

>> That's absurd. There's a certain area where Guido can make >> pronouncements, but third-party packages is not it. Even if they're >> hosted on python.org infrastructure. Guido> Right. Now if you were the un-BDFL you could step in here. ;-) This whole topic seems to have a lot of people fairly agitated, so clearly it's important to a significant subset of the Python development community. Might I suggest taking this off python-dev for awhile though? I seem to recall a similar suggestion a couple days ago to take it to distutils-sig or python-ideas, but that seems to have been ignored.) I mostly tuned the entire thread out until I saw that Guido had joined in the fray (sort of). Maybe since I don't distribute a lot of Python packages it's not as important to me. Let me know when you've solved the problem. I trust you. Skip