[Distutils] setuptools for people behind a firewall

[Ian Bicking]

Paul Moore wrote:
> 2. A way of specifying an external command to use to download files
> over HTTP. This would (for example) allow me to use curl, which does
> support HTLM proxies, rather than relying on Python's built-in HTTP
> support, which doesn't.

Someone mentioned curl to me in a ticket, but didn't mention 
specifically why it was "better".  I assume now that NTLM was the issue. 
   They submitted this patch that used pycurl:

  http://pythonpaste.org/trac/attachment/ticket/10/build-pkg.diff

I imagine that would be an easy change to setuptools as well.  Though it 
would be nice if setuptools could detect the case where urllib failed 
due to an NTLM firewall, so it could suggest (in the error message) that 
the user install pycurl.  I don't know how easy pycurl is to install -- 
I wonder in practice if command-line interaction with curl would be 
easier to get people to install (pycurl doesn't appear to have 
up-to-date windows installers).

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org