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

[David Cournapeau]

K. Richard Pixley wrote:
> Alex Grönholm wrote:
>> There is a lack of consensus regarding how exactly they should work.
>> If we are having this much trouble deciding how a third party tool
>> should work, it is certainly not going to be merged into distutils
>> until those issues have been resolved. Distutils is what houses (or
>> should) the parts we all agree on. That said, I think that plenty of
>> setuptools/distribute functionality should be moved to distutils
>> (after the code has been cleaned up and the proper unit tests
>> introduced). 
> I agree there's a lack of consensus.  But I dont' believe that
> distutils is a strong basis for growth.  Distutils may be a reasonable
> choice of a build tool, (I'm not sure yet), but it's packaging and
> distribution support is minimal to nonexistent.

It is certainly not a good basis as a  build tool - it does not handle
dependencies for once, and the only thing it really brings is a poor
cross-platform implementation to build dynamically loaded libraries,
without even a coherent and documented API (you can't introspect
something as trivial as compilation flags or where files are built in a
cross-platform way, for example).

> Most of what I'm talking about here speaks to packaging formats,
> distribution processes, and installation processes.  And this isn't
> new technology.  Both debian, rpm, and several other unix technologies
> have fine systems in operation right now.  Sure, they all have
> weaknesses, but they are much better than easy_install.

Not if you don't want/can't spend quite some time to know about each
supported platform and the tool details.

cheers,

David