[Catalog-sig] PyPI and setuptools

[Jesse Noller]

On Feb 9, 2013, at 6:13 PM, Stephen Thorne <stephen at thorne.id.au> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> One of my concerns with the recent pip dramas that have seen some excellent and timely action from catalog-sig and others, is that 'setuptools' is still widely distributed and used instead of distribute/pip.

Well, lets back up: these aren't pip specific problems: just about every client side tool for installing from pypi suffers from lax security. 

> 
> Setuptools either needs to be sunset, notices put on pypi, warnings given to its users, out of linux distros, or it has to upgraded to be feature compatible with the security updates.
> 
> That's a strong statement I've made, but I feel strongly that something has to be done. I would like to solicit opinions here before an action plan is composed.

This is a bit of a question mark to me: the reality is that easy_install/setup tools usage is probably still dramatically higher than that of more modern tooling. That, and AFAIK, there are still features of them that the alternatives do not support (binary eggs, which are a must for windows).

This leaves us at the point where they can not be sunset unless the "other tools" grow the features of setuptools/easy_install or we (the collective we) take on the burden of updating that tool chain to support secure installations.

Just patching them for security fixes seems like an "easy" task; the bigger question is how to do that only without further feature addition and getting a release out the door?

Jesse