[Distutils] Installed but can't run the quickstart

[Ian Bicking]

Bob Ippolito wrote:
> Well, if it makes a difference, EasyInstall works great on Mac OS X  and 
> Windows.  If Debian users had been more active with the  EasyInstall 
> development process then the experience would be better  there also.

I've used EasyInstall on Debian all along, without problems (well, no 
more than anyone else I think).  I guess I just happened to avoid 
conflicts with debian packages (well, sometimes).  The setuptools deb 
package should just be removed; as far as I can tell nothing depends on 
it anyway (well, at least on my now-Ubuntu system "apt-cache rdepends 
python2.3-setuptools" shows nothing).

There is a significant concern about setuptools conflicting with Debian 
packages, which I have encountered, and you can't always uninstall the 
Debian package because that can have cascading effects.  At some point 
there needs to be a way to tell setuptools that a package has been 
provided, egg or no egg.  Surprisingly nothing depends on ElementTree 
(that I can find), but docutils is caught up in the network of Debian 
dependencies.  (Well, there's also ways of indicating to Debian that 
you've provided a dependency somehow besides the package, but I can't 
remember how.)

Since this really has just become a Distutils discussion I'll copy it 
over there...

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