[Distutils] Package install failures in 2.6.3 - setuptools vs Distribute

[Jeff Rush]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> 2009/10/3 Ned Deily <nad at acm.org>:
>> This is not a good experience for users.  Unless I'm missing something
>> (and I hope I am), this issue really can't be hand-waved away.
> 
> It's unfortunate that this comes in a minor release.

Very unfortunate, as in, it should NOT have happened.  And *especially*
without any announcement on python.org or mention on the
python-committers list of something this major.

> But at the same
> time we can hardly avoid fixing bugs just because setuptools isn't
> getting updated at the moment. It's a lose-lose situation.

Setuptools is hardly a minor software tool.  Considering that setuptools
is a major focus and key technology of this group, those making changes
to distutils should have tested against setuptools and devised a
solution providing backward compatibility, along with deprecation
warnings.  Lennart and Tarek, I know you at least are familiar with this
valuable practice in Zope for years.

At the least, those making changes to Distutils should, after testing
against Setuptools, widely announced this was coming.  It does not
reflect positively on the Distribute team and even hints of
under-the-table intentionality in forcing the community to abandon use
of setuptools.  Distribute should win because of superior technology not
forced migration.


> As I see it this will speed up adaptation of Distribute. Word will
> spread. It's not ideal, but then it's not a perfect world.

Distribute is very new and there are many folk who will not be adopting
it until it has been out for quite some time.  It is a fact of the
conservative nature of some development teams.  If setuptools were an
optional, little-used technology in Python it would not be a big deal
but it isn't.  It is not appropriate to -force- users to adopt a
particular branch of a fork, except perhaps in the move from Python 2.x
to 3.x where major changes are anticipated and there was no setuptools
for 3.x anyway.

Considering that 2.6.3 is messed up in other ways, like displaying the
SVN rc1 tag and a broken logging module, and probably will be
re-released at 2.6.4 very shortly, perhaps we can get this -at least-
into the Python docs and maybe introduce backward compatible hooks into
distutils to support setuptools.

-Jeff