[Distutils] Colour this bikeshed: Name for setuptools fork

[Leonardo Santagada]

On Jul 17, 2009, at 5:05 PM, Hanno Schlichting wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 6:48 PM, Leonardo Santagada<santagada at gmail.com 
> > wrote:
>> Setuptools is dead, but the fork should be named something else  
>> just to show that development doesn't have anything to do with the  
>> way setuptools and is in fact a new and live project. People that  
>> were burned by setuptools should give distribute a new chance.
>
> As with every OS project our fork will need to better define what
> exactly it wants to achieve.
>
> I will just say that I wholeheartedly disagree with the underlying
> notion of the above statement.
>
> I think setuptools is by and large a huge success and has pushed
> package management in Python to a new level.  What we need is ongoing
> maintenance and very careful evolution of it. Package management is no
> place to go crazy and fancy. We will need to carefully look at what we
> want to do and how we do it after some of the early strong emotional
> reactions have settled down.
>
> Anyone who wants to rewrite setuptools from scratch or thinks
> "easy_install must die" probably will be very disappointed by the
> distribute fork.

What I meant is that the pace that setuptools took in the last 9 or so  
months is over, and people that sent patches only to see them rot on  
the issue tracker should look at distribute as a place to try again.  
For example people that were using svn 1.6 just to see setuptools  
failing and never be fixed should feel safe again knowing that if a  
new version of their favorite scm comes along someone (even oneself)  
will patch it to work and not be forced to work with an older version  
because of setuptools.

The bit about easy_install is more about its terrible user interface  
(ok command line user interface) and it messing around syspath than  
any of its other features.

What I would like to see to easy_install would be progress meters on  
downloads, simpler way to tell it by default not to mess with sys.path  
and maybe atomic installs where it would either install all packages  
that you asked or none.

--
Leonardo Santagada
santagada at gmail.com