[Distutils] setuptools 0.6 beta branch created - trunk is 0.7 alpha

[Phillip J. Eby]

I've just created a SVN branch for setuptools 0.6 beta and beyond, which 
can now be accessed with 'setuptools=dev06'.  'setuptools==dev' now refers 
to the 0.7 development trunk.

I had to do this now because there's a fair amount of surgery I need to do 
to make setuptools merge with the Python 2.5 standard library, including 
module moves, renames, etc.  So, to not lose all the hard-won stability of 
0.6 as it is, I've split things up.

Naturally, I hope that 0.7 will be just as stable as 0.6; it's more of a 
"have something always ready to release" issue.  There's going to be some 
fairly intense reshufflings of the source code, though, including a switch 
from reStructuredText to PythonDoc LaTeX for the documentation, due to the 
need for integration with the Python documentation system.  The C source 
code for the launcher will get moved, etc.  There is also going to be some 
code migrated from pkg_resources to the stdlib's "pkgutil" module - 
specifically, the importer-specific infrastructure for filesystem and 
zipfile packages, as it's already been duplicated two other places in the 
stdlib.  So the plan is to consolidate the various versions of this into 
pkgutil.  setuptools 0.7 will include a replacement version of pkgutil for 
use by version of Python <2.5, but the setuptools bundled with Python 2.5 
will just use the stdlib pkgutil.

I don't plan to make any API changes to pkg_resources, however.  It's only 
some of the implementation that's moving.  It's also likely that Python 2.5 
and up will use 'python -m easy_install' as the default way to invoke 
easy_install, but the older versions will retain their separate 
easy_install executable.

I'll keep you posted here if there are any changes to the above.  Please 
keep in mind that if you are currently relying on 'setuptools==dev' being 
relatively stable, you should consider whether you want to start using 
'setuptools==dev06' instead, at least until an actual 0.7a1 release is 
available.

In the meantime, I'm assuming that all is going well with 0.6a11, and that 
it can reasonably be bumped to 0.6b1 sometime next month.  Please let me 
know if there are any issues outstanding with the 0.6 versions.  Thanks.