[Distutils] disappointed by setupTools

[Bob Ippolito]

On 10/16/06, Pierre Imbaud <pierre at saiph.com> wrote:
> Im a little bit disappointed by setupTools. Not that much the tool itself,
> than the learning curve.
> Maybe the problem at hand is far from simple, and thats what makes the
> solution so intricate.
> http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/setuptools: this document is
> 100 pages long! (by page I mean: full screen).
> easyInstall is 40 pages.
> I spent about 3 days to figure out what goes where. And I realize Im
> not done.
> Yet the documentation is remarkable, great presentation, text is
> precise and clear, when U read it. Makes U feel guilty U dont find
> what U lookin for, but U dont find it.

The current documentation is a reference, not a tutorial. It's long
because it's exhaustive. What's needed is different documentation for
new users.

> I just discovered scripts dont get installed directly (in
> /usr/local/bin), instead a wrapper in installed, that calls the
> script. So an extra file is involved, and extra code, every time the
> script is called. Makes some overhead, and it breaks a simple
> mechanism I use: my script is able to perform many actions, based on
> its name (much like cp, mv and ln are the same executable). at
> install, I need to make symlinks to the script, one per action, and
> this was automated: this is broken by the wrapping. No big deal, just
> makes things less simple.
> Good tools have 2 qualities:
> - When U need simple things, its easy to use.
> - When U need more sophisticated things, U dont need to give up the
>    tool for a more powerful one: just have to use extra features.
> Python is a wonderful illustration of this.
> While setupTools obviously provides the latter, I consider it fails on
> the former.
> I decided to use setupTools after reading, and failing to understand,
> distutils. setupTools seemed both more powerful and simpler.
> Probably this choice will save me some trouble later. Im not sure it
> helped so far.

It doesn't work because you're doing it the wrong way. If you want to
see what a command was invoked as, use sys.argv[0]... that's what it's
for.

Also, you don't *have* to use entry points to make scripts (though
it's generally better to)... the scripts kwarg to setup works the same
way that it does for distutils.

-bob