[Distutils] Questionnaire: Why do you use setuptools?

[Lennart Regebro]

Setuptools non-support for Python 3 is currently a serious hindrance
towards Python 3 aceptance. I'm trying to figure out what to do as a
next step in the Python 3 support for setuptools. And I have
encountered some obstacles. The first one is that setuptools requires
itself for installing and running tests. That makes it hard to install
it under Python 3. There are various solutions to this, but the next
obstacle I encounter in choosing the right solution is that the code
is hard to understand, and it makes me want to just rip it out and
start over, or in even more frustrated moments, avoid the problems by
not using setuptools at all. But the third obstacle for that is that I
don't actually know what features of setuptools people use.

I personally use setuptools for these reasons:

1. When I create projects with paster, it uses setuptools.
2. Setuptools makes it possible to specify requirements, which is then
used by buildout.
3. Namespace packages require pkg_resources?
4. The test command.

What are the other major reasons people use setuptools?

Is there any good reason to not extract the namespace package support
into a separate package?

-- 
Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
+33 661 58 14 64