[Distutils] Some negative press for easy_install

[Andrew Straw]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:

>At 11:10 AM 2/9/2006 -0500, Kevin Dangoor wrote:
>  
>
>>Could you do something like this:
>>
>>try:
>>    from setuptools import setup
>>except ImportError:
>>    from distutils.core import setup
>>
>>On your system, you'd then be able to build eggs at will. Other people
>>who download an sdist but don't have setuptools will just get normal
>>sdist-like behavior.
>>    
>>
>
>Almost.  You'll have to use MANIFEST.in or they won't be able to do 
>bdist_rpm or certain other commands from your sdist.  That is, you can't 
>use setuptools' revision control features, since they won't have them 
>available.
>  
>
Note that matplotlib tried essentially this for a while, but apparently 
some folks really didn't like it. I'm not sure what exactly broke on 
their systems (they didn't complain to the mailing list), but when 
setup.py reverted to a plain distutils script, they cheered. Matplotlib 
now has setupegg.py:

from setuptools import setup
execfile('setup.py',
         {'additional_params' :
          {'namespace_packages' : ['matplotlib.toolkits']}})

I guess the point is that just because someone has setuptools installed 
on their system doesn't mean they want to use it.

Another option, for a single setup.py, is something like the following:

if 'setuptools' in sys.modules:
   use_setuptools_options()

This way, setup.py can be setuptools-aware without doing 'import 
setuptools', but the user would have to do:
python -c "import setuptools; execfile('setup.py')"