[Distutils] virtualenv with distribute

[Ian Bicking]

Philip Jenvey started a fork of virtualenv with Distribute support:
http://bitbucket.org/pjenvey/virtualenv-distribute/
Right now there's some other higher priority things for virtualenv (i.e.,
straight up bug fixes and long requested features), and I want to get pip
into environments (avoiding easy_install pip, which feels too ironic), and
once pip is in then it would be necessary that Distribute be compatible with
pip before this work could get merged.

It would be ideal from my perspective if virtualenv could install Distribute
in addition to Setuptools, not instead of Setuptools.  This would be the
least likely to cause backward compatibility issues for users, and people
could transition at their own pace.  I'm not really clear how compatible the
two are.  Also it would be advantageous to just have one line of
development, so the newest virtualenv always installs the newest Distribute,
and it's clear what that is (no different branches, no
backward-compatible-breaking releases, etc).

Of course, you will always be able to install Distribute into a virtualenv
after creating it -- virtualenv's relationship to Setuptools is purely to
bootstrap an environment to a useful state, and even if it installs pip you
can always uninstall pip (or just mess with the environment so as to break
pip, and then just not use pip).

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