[Distutils] [issue24] Rename easy_install

[Dave Peterson]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> At 06:27 PM 6/16/2008 -0500, Dave Peterson wrote:
>> Phillip J. Eby wrote:
>>> At 12:57 PM 6/16/2008 +1200, Greg Ewing wrote:
>>>> Any discussion of that sort seems to get hopelessly
>>>> bogged down, so bikeshedding is all that's left for
>>>> people to do.
>>>
>>> What about testing patches?  Writing test code?  Writing more docs?
>>> There's *plenty* of less controversial work to go around.  The only 
>>> reason most of the outstanding patches I'm aware of haven't been 
>>> applied yet is because they haven't been tested.  (Or more 
>>> precisely, because setuptools hasn't been thoroughly tested with the 
>>> patches applied.)
>>
>>
>> I can help test some of the patches
>
> Don't test patches - test setuptools with the patches.  :)  More 
> precisely, make sure you test things beyond what the patch is supposed 
> to do, to make sure that other things aren't affected.  This is 
> particularly important for patches to easy_install, which is 
> ridiculously complicated
> due to all the obscure edge cases it has to be able to handle.

Right.  That is what I meant but worded poorly. :-)


>>  I've seen people posting to the tracker, but I can't commit to 
>> svn.   Beyond running the setuptools test suite
>
> The test suite is pretty useless for most of these kinds of patches.  
> It essentially only exercises various internals of pkg_resources and a 
> few other things that are almost never touched.  I'm talking testing 
> as in "actually install some packages in a few different kinds of 
> install targets, using a few different options".  I don't have a 
> rigorous process for that, as I tend to pick things on the basis of 
> the code paths to be exercised.  But that might not be an option for 
> casual testers.

Still, I'd run it anyway. :-)   I definitely don't have the depth of 
experience to know what features being exercised hit what code paths.   
But I do use setuptools for both building and installing on Windows XP, 
Mac OS X, and various Linux flavors.   We heavily use eggs here at 
Enthought. :-)


> If I had it all to do over -- and I didn't simply run screaming from 
> attempting the task in the first place -- I would write a full 
> functional test suite, including chrooting tests if necessary.  In the 
> long run, it would have saved enormous amounts of manual test time, 
> and we could have had more people involved in development a long time 
> ago.
>
> That, by the way, is why "writing test code" is on the list above.
>
>
>> and verifying that things seems to work for me and my environment, is 
>> there anything else that will help get some of the patches into svn?
>>
>> BTW, most of those things you mention all effectively boil down to 
>> writing patches in one way or another. :-)  How do we make sure that 
>> after they get some review they get checked in when it seems so few 
>> people have check-in privileges?  Phillip, you already mentioned that 
>> you're short on time and no one else has responded to a plea for 
>> finding out who has check-in privileges.
>
> Jim Fulton has previously been "blessed" by me to apply 
> non-controversial patches to setuptools after giving me a heads-up.  
> (But note that he's probably busier than I am, and unlikely to have 
> bandwidth for stuff that doesn't affect zc.buildout or Zope in some way.)
>
> If you want to expand the available development pool for setuptools, I 
> would strongly suggest focusing development efforts on creating a 
> regression test suite emphasizing end-to-end functional testing of the 
> current functionality.  Such tests would ideally be factored for 
> narrative clarity and compact expressiveness, rather like Jim Fulton's 
> doctests for easy_install's .exe wrappers, and the doctests for 
> zc.buildout.  (Because if they're too complicated for me to read, 
> they'll take too long for me to review.)

Okay, we'll see what we can do about that here at Enthought.  So far 
we'd been focusing on bugs / new features that we thought needed to be 
addressed but that effort can be redirected a bit to helping write 
tests.  I think Tarek suggested a sprint this weekend but I'm not sure 
if any of our guys will be available that soon.  I'll ask around.

-- Dave