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

[Ronald Oussoren]

On Monday, 05 October, 2009, at 11:53AM, "Lennart Regebro" <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
>2009/10/5 Jeff Rush <jeff at taupro.com>:
>> 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.
>
>Well "this major"... It's a bug fix that breaks a setuptools monkey-patch.
>But yes, it was discovered before release, and maybe it should have
>been discussed, I'm not on python-dev anymore.

I agree with Jeff that this shouldn't have happened, or should at the very least
have been documented in the release notes for 2.6.3. I know of several users
of Python that have been bitten by this (they installed 2.6.3 and now easy_install
doesn't work anymore for them).  

For beginners this issue is a showstopper that they cannot resolve without help.

>
>
>> Distribute is very new and there are many folk who will not be adopting
>> it until it has been out for quite some time.
>
>Nobody will adopt it until they are forced to. This unfortunate bug
>means people are forced to quicker than expected. I don't think that's
>an actual problem.

This is a problem, it means 2.6.3 is not a simple drop-in replacement for 2.6.2 but requires the replacement of another component as well.  That can be a problem in organizations with strict configuration management where you cannot install new software without going to lots of red tape (and that might involve lawyers when you install a new package instead of upgrading an existing one).

Ronald