[Distutils] Questionnaire: Why do you use setuptools?

[Ian Bicking]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 4:09 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> 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.


Of course if you create a project template that uses distutils, then that's
what you'll get... just happens no one does that with paster templates.


>
> 2. Setuptools makes it possible to specify requirements, which is then
> used by buildout.


In pip at least it does this with *.egg-info/install_requires.txt, but in
easy_install and I'm guessing buildout it's using the
pkg_resources.Distribution object.


>
> 3. Namespace packages require pkg_resources?


There's a way of doing it with pkgutils, but in some way that I don't
understand, pkg_resources does it better.


>
> 4. The test command.
>
> What are the other major reasons people use setuptools?
>

Entry points are the big one for me.  There is some other metadata that I
use from time to time, but I'm sure I could work around it.  Of course
there's the specific things pip uses as noted in a previous email.


-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org
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