[Distutils] Setuptools should not depend on setuptools.

[P.J. Eby]

At 11:04 PM 3/11/2009 +0100, Lennart Regebro wrote:
>On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 22:56, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > If you're trying to say that you want a build process that can run without
> > there being a 2.x interpreter present, but starts with the same source code
> > base, I don't see how that's possible without having some sort of
> > alternative setup3.py or other .py scripts present, to do the conversion.
>
>It's not a problem in general, the probleme here is that setuptools
>setup.py depends on setuptools, causing a catch22 situation, where you
>need to convert setuptools to Python3, before you can run the
>installer install it, and therefore you can't run the installer to
>convert to Python 3.

That's not a catch 22.  You simply run a 2.x setup.py with options 
that cause the conversion to take place before running 3.x over the 
converted result.  Now you have a 3.x version.

Heck, you could probably just make a '2to3' command plugin, that 
converts the program and then runs python3 on the converted setup.py, 
passing in its remaining arguments, such that e.g.:

    python setup.py 2to3 [options] test ...

Would be the equivalent of running 2to3 with the specified options, 
then running "python3 setup.py test ..." in the target directory.

Again, I'm not seeing where any problem exists here.