[Distutils] Questionnaire: Why do you use setuptools?

[Tres Seaver]

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Lennart Regebro wrote:
> 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?

- - setuptools.find_pacakges built-in SVN support makes a whole class of
  packaging errors go away for me.

- - virtualenv makes isolation between different applications sane;
  it installs setuptools, and then makes 'easy_install' a pleasure
  to use (I still can't believe people use easy_install in their
  system Python!)

- - entry points serve as crude equivalents of "named utilities"
  in the Zope component architecture;  they allow an application to
  define a class of plug points, which are then filled by other
  libraries.  These plug points can then be configured together
  declaratively (e.g. in an INI file) using their names.


Tres.
- --
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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