[Distutils] setuptools: package management and explicit version numbers

[Paul Moore]

On 8/11/05, Phillip J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> At 10:40 AM 8/11/2005 +0100, Paul Moore wrote:
> >there's a transitional problem with bdist_wininst installers, which
> >needs some thinking about (and no, easy_install's "convert a wininst
> >installer to an egg" feature isn't an answer - it loses things like
> >cx_Oracle's documentation,
> 
> FYI, if there's a source distribution, the new --editable option (in CVS)
> allows you to download and extract the source for editing, without building
> it or anything.

I'm not sure how that helps. If there's a source, I can just run
setup.py bdist_wininst anyway, so I don't see the difference.

> I could probably actually add postinstall hooks to EasyInstall, except that
> it sort of goes against the concept of eggs being a "zero install"
> format.  It's worth thinking about/investigating though.

Given that the trend seems to be to install eggs via easy_install, I'm
not sure "zero install" still applies. But if I can still just drop
eggs into sys.path, maybe it does. Must review this stuff again.

> That's not going to happen real soon; only a relatively tiny number of
> people even know eggs exist, and as long as they have a reasonably-usable
> bdist_wininst available then it's certainly a valid choice to just
> distribute that, thereby pleasing EasyInstall users and non-users alike.

That's what I thought. And it makes me reluctant to bother with eggs
for standard packages at all, sadly. (Plugins etc are a completely
different matter - for them, I think it's a wonderful technology!)

> Some packages of course may be eventually only be distributed as eggs.  For
> example, I'm switching all of my win32 binary distributions to eggs, which
> means you'll have to compile from source if you want a bdist_wininst.

Which is probably what I'll do. But I thought setuptools no longer
works if it's installed via bdist_wininst?

Sorry, I have to run now (shouldn't have started this email...) I'll
comment more later.

Paul.