[Distutils] Twisted and easy_install

[Bob Ippolito]

On Feb 5, 2006, at 10:22 AM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> At 07:05 AM 2/5/2006 -0800, Jay Parlar wrote:
>> I'm having trouble doing an install of the newest Twisted from the
>> Cheeseshop, using easy_install. I took a quick look through the
>> archives of distutils-sig, and couldn't find anything. I'm running on
>> OS X 10.3.9, latest version of setuptools (did an 'easy_install -U
>> setuptools' right before I tried installing Twisted). I've pasted the
>> result below. Any thoughts?
> [...]
>> AttributeError: 'bool' object has no attribute 'name'
>
> Twisted does some interesting mangling of the build_ext process in  
> order to
> support optional extensions, that are only determined at build  
> time.  I've
> been meaning to add a facility to do this in setuptools, but it's  
> not done
> yet, and in any case Twisted would have to *use* that facility in  
> order for
> it to work.  I'm afraid Twisted isn't supportable by easy_install  
> at the
> present time.

Not only that, but the top-level script for Twisted isn't distutils  
based.  It is a script that invokes several setup.py files for each  
of the subprojects if given "build" or "install" as options, and  
otherwise takes totally different arguments.

Even if it did install with easy_install it would be a little  
misleading since Twisted requires Zope.Interface and has a bunch of  
extras (like SSL or serial support).  Twisted really could use a good  
refactor to support setuptools, but the core team isn't interested in  
doing that.

I believe Zope.Interface is not compatible with setuptools also.  I'm  
not sure why... I think it's the distribution name or something.

-bob