[Distutils] distribute and buildout: best practices?

[Reinout van Rees]

What's the current best way to use both distribute and buildout?  Apart from
the bootstrap + apparently needed change in buildout, I've got the following
questions:

- Do my libraries have to list a dependency on distribute or on setuptools?
  Everything zopish has a 'setuptools >= 0.6c9' in it.  I tried putting
  distribute in there, but I seemed to get less problems with leaving it at
  setuptools.

- Should just globally installing distribute be enough?  Everything ought to
  keep working.  It does lead to a bunch of runtime warnings in buildout,
  however.  (But Tarek has targeted that problem for the upcoming 0.6.4 :-)

- Do I need to change buildout's bootstrap already? Doing that tries to change
  my global setuptools, for which you need to sudo.  And it also forces
  everyone else using that buildout to switch (which in itself is OK).

- From my experiments (not exhaustive! no real debugging!) it seems that the
  only safe way is to first install distribute globally before touching a
  buildout that brings in distribute.  Is this to be expected?


Reinout

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Reinout van Rees - reinout at vanrees.org - http://reinout.vanrees.org
Software developer at http://www.thehealthagency.com
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