[Distutils] The problem with Setuptools on Python 3.

[Paul Moore]

2009/4/20 Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 11:44, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>> +1 for building setuptools on a base of distutils only, especially if
>> it's already been achieved.
>
> No, we are going to have to make special custom extensions, at least
> for running tests. It's not that much work, but it is code
> duplication. I don't have the full overview of what features we lose
> either. But it does seem to me that most of these features, like the
> source eggs, cause more trouble than they solve.

Are you saying that you need to use setuptools (or at least the
feaures of setuptools) to develop setuptools? That's crazy. To run the
setuptools tests, just run the test.py (or whatever) script. The
setuptools ability to type python setup.py test, while convenient,
simply isn't available while you're developing setuptools. The same
logic applies to *any* setuptools feature that is used in the
development of setuptools itself. Trying to make it available adds
lots of complexity for the benefit of very few people (ie, people
writing the setuptools code).

Bootstrapping like this should be reserved for people writing C
compilers in C, and other equally major-league projects.

Just my view, and I'm not a setuptools fan, so you can probably
disregard it. (But this type of complexity for its own sake is the
reason I dislike the whole setuptools philosophy, so maybe it's worth
making explicit...)

Paul.