[Distutils] Newbie questions about setuptools

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 09:45 AM 6/19/2007 -0500, Edward Ream wrote:
>1. On both XP and Ubuntu, running
>
>python setup.py bdist_egg
>
>gives a .egg file with a suffix of py2.5.egg, even though the version arg to
>setup is '4.4.3preview9' I was expecting a suffix of all.egg, because
>platforms = ['all',] Can anyone explain what is going on?

Eggs are named in the 
form  "projectname-version-pythonversion[-optionalplatform].egg"; if 
you do not include any platform-specific code, the platform suffix is 
omitted.  The Python version is included because .pyc and .pyo files 
are specific to a particular version of Python.

(Also, the 'platforms' argument to setup() has no effect on the 
platform suffix or whether there is one.  It's a recently introduced 
feature in newer Pythons that only affects the generation of PKG-INFO files.)


>2.  The resulting egg file is much larger than the .zip file created by
>'python setup.py sdist' in spite of exclude_package_data = { '':
>['*.pyc','*.pyo']},
>
>Is there any way to exclude .pyc and .pyo files?

No; you can exclude the source if you like, though, with 
--exclude-source-files.  Eggs are a binary distribution format, 
originally developed to support user-installed plugins for systems 
like Chandler, Zope, etc.  They aren't a source distribution format; 
sdist works well enough for that and for easy_install if you have a 
pure-Python package (or your users have C compilers).


>3. 'python setup.py register' works fine, but 'python setup.py upload' fails
>with an 'invalid request' returned from the server.  Maybe because the egg
>is over 8Meg?

I have no idea; I'd suggest using the --show-response option so you 
can see what's happening.


>4. 'easy_install leo' is supposed to use the download_url link arg.  This is
>a great idea.  Alas, for me it is spoiled by the setuptools pre/post release
>naming convention. The problem is that this convention is applied to all the
>links on the download_url page.  Because I can't upload to the Python Cheese
>Shop, I used Leo's SourceForge download page for the main Leo project.  The
>setup.py script is supposed to find the latest release on the page, but
>setup.py thinks that the latest match is something like Leo-4.2.1.zip (!!)
>This in spite of the fact that Leo-4.4.3rc1.zip exists on the page.

I don't follow you; here's the output from my attempt at downloading 
from the SF page:

$ easy_install -nvf 
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3458 leo
Searching for leo
Reading http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3458
Best match: leo 4.4.3preview8
Downloading 
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/leo/leo-4.4.3preview8.zip?modtime=1182088519&big_mirror=0

Perhaps you've changed something else?


>5. setuptools is advertised as an 0.x release.  This post appeared over a
>year ago,
>
>http://bitworking.org/news/Please_stop_using_setuptools__at_least_exclusively__for_now____
>
>This post may be obsolete, but it troubles me.  I suppose I wouldn't worry
>so much were it not for these other issues.

The issues reported in that post were fixed within days of the blog 
posting; they'd have been fixed even faster if its author had 
actually asked about the issues here.

Setuptools is currently at 0.6c6.  There are a handful of known 
issues and quirks remaining, but it is otherwise pretty darn stable.