[Distutils] The problem with Setuptools on Python 3.

[Lennart Regebro]

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 14:21, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are you saying that you need to use setuptools (or at least the
> feaures of setuptools) to develop setuptools?

Currently, yes. The testsuite is run with the testrunner of
setuptools. You can run them separately too, I'm sure, but that's a
pain. There is no test.py to run. Maybe you can use nose or something
to run the tests, but then again you would need to port *nose* to
Python 3... :-/

> That's crazy. To run the
> setuptools tests, just run the test.py (or whatever) script.

There isn't any. And to do that you need to convert it to Python 3
first, and we are back to the "run a porting script, then run a test
command", which is what we want to avoid in the first place. distutils
have code exactly to help this kind of situation, so I think we should
depend on that.

> setuptools ability to type python setup.py test, while convenient,
> simply isn't available while you're developing setuptools.

Sure it is. Maybe it *shouldn't*. But it *is*. Except under Python 3,
of course, which is the problem.

> 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).

It's not so much "trying to". Since the structure of the package is
such that setuptools end up directly on the path, it *is* available.
So the question is if we should make sure it *isn't* available, by
moving it all down into a src directory, and then modify the
setup-script so that it no longer depends on setuptools.

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

Are you saying setuptools isn't major-league? ;-)

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Lennart Regebro: Python, Zope, Plone, Grok
http://regebro.wordpress.com/
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