[Distutils] Cheesecake service

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:14 PM 2/14/2007 -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:
>I think that's just a broken package.  It shouldn't do that.  Actually 
>finddata probably isn't necessary anymore if they use 
>include_package_data=True.  Otherwise they should copy that file into 
>their package before using it.

Well, there's broken and there's broken.  Obviously, for most TurboGears 
users the package isn't going to fail - either they have Turbogears or the 
egg is going to be downloaded instead of the source tarball, which means 
that the setup.py won't be an issue.

That having been said, what you just said is of course also 100% correct - 
they should probably be using include_package_data instead.

By the way, it's not entirely clear to me what the Cheesecake system 
actually tests.  My initial response to some of the TurboGears packages 
being listed as not installable was disbelief, because they are in fact 
usable with easy_install, as long as the author of the package uploaded an 
egg compatible with your Python version and platform.  It's merely the case 
that building the package from source will fail without TurboGears being 
present.

However, this makes me wonder if there are false successes as well.  If 
Cheesecake merely tests whether "setup.py install" works, this is not the 
same as easy_install being able to run on the package.  For example, 
Twisted has a working "setup.py install", but it is pretty much impossible 
to install with easy_install.  Twisted isn't listed on the current page, 
but I wonder what column it would be in, if it were.