[Distutils] should setuptools be an implicit dependency of every egg?

[Jim Fulton]

On Sep 19, 2006, at 8:11 AM, Jim Fulton wrote:
...
> Note that the scripts generated by zc.buildout don't use
> pkg_resources to determine the eggs to be loaded at run time.

It's also worth noting that the eggs documentation, http:// 
peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/PythonEggs, explicitly advertises  
that setuptools is not needed to use eggs:

   "If you have a pure-Python .egg file that doesn't use any in- 
package data files, and you don't mind manually placing it on  
sys.path or PYTHONPATH, you can use the egg without installing  
setuptools. "

I'm going to start with the following compromise in zc.buildout.  If  
an egg uses namespace packages, then I'll treat setuptools as a  
dependency of the egg even if the egg doesn't list it as a  
dependency.  This will address the common case of eggs using  
setuptools soley for namespace-package support.

Jim

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