[Distutils] workingenv/setuptools compatibility

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 04:04 PM 2/20/2007 -0600, Ian Bicking wrote:
>Hi again.  I mentioned this a long time ago, but I'd like to talk about
>it again: I'd really like to remove workingenv's monkeypatching of
>setuptools.

Then remove it.  :)

You can trivially replace any setuptools built-in commands by simply 
ensuring that you have corresponding 'distutils.commands' entry points in 
the working set ahead of setuptools.  An easy way to do this in workingenv 
would be to place your own egg in the easy-install.pth, and removing 
setuptools' egg from there (leaving it in setuptools.pth).

This will then let you override the 'easy_install' and 'develop' commands, 
to do whatever you want them to.

The only pieces this won't affect are the way setup_requires and 
tests_require get handled (as they use direct imports from 
setuptools.commands.easy_install) and the way 
--single-version-externally-managed installs get their scripts generated 
(which also uses direct imports).

However, if I understand correctly, you don't need either of these pieces.

Anyway, to do all this, you will need to have an egg that lists entry 
points for 'easy_install' and 'develop' under the 'distutils.commands' group.

(Actually, you might want to include an entry point for 'install' as well, 
and override the do_egg_install method, which currently imports 
easy_install directly instead of using 
self.distribution.get_command_class('easy_install').  I'll fix that in 0.6c6.)