[Distutils] Packaging Distribute

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 12:03 AM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 11:07:13PM +0200, Arfrever Frehtes Taifersar Arahesis wrote:
>> 2009-10-04 23:52:25 Sridhar Ratnakumar napisał(a):
>> > On Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:41:06 -0700, Tarek Ziadé <ziade.tarek at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > The other way would be to use Distribute instead of Setuptools for
>> > > what the packaging system is calling "setuptools". That's pretty
>> > > much what is happening in Gentoo (arch) and UHU-Linux (dev),
>> > > right now
>> >
>> > Interesting. Gentoo uses distribute but retains the name 'setuptools'?
>>
>> It's because Distribute 0.6.* installs setuptools.* modules.
>> Distribute 0.7.* will be under name dev-python/distribute.
>>
> I started thinking about what it might take to do this for Fedora as well.
> There's a number of worries I have but it sounds attractive because of the
> increased maintainence support from distribute's upstream.
>
> An alternative I thought of would be for us to ship both distribute-0.6 and
> distribute-0.7 (when it arrives) and parallel install them.  Then we can
> patch the setuptools using packages we maintain to check first for the 0.6
> distribute and fall back on setuptools if it's not found.  That would
> hopefully get a bunch of upstreams onto a better supported code base.
>
> My question is: will Distribute have a parallel installation plan?  For
> instance, renaming the module provided by 0.7 distribute2?  If so, this
> makes a lot of sense.  If not, it's the ability of gentoo to reuse the
> setuptools name that makes parallel installation of distribute-0.6 and
> distribute-0.7 easier.

We are not sure yet, but when 0.7 will be ready we have two choices:

1- we ship 0.7 under a new name - e.g. like "distribute2"
2- we ship a fat 0.7 with the old 0.6 packages and modules included.

I think 1- is better, because it's cleaner in many ways. Plus, people that will
start to use 0.7 will not mind using the "distribute2" name.

Tarek