[Distutils] why would you ever need to specify setuptools as a dependency?

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 04:04:06PM +0100, Chris Withers wrote:
> Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 03:28:57PM +0100, Chris Withers wrote:
>>> In this case, which I suspect is extremely rare anyway, you'll need 
>>> to  have setuptools installed already.
>>>
>>> So, in *any* of these cases, specifying setuptools as a requirement  
>>> seems like a total waste of time...
>>>
>>> Now, what case have I missed? ;-)
>>>
>> It's nice for people creating system packages when you specify all of the
>> packages that your runtime depends on in setup.py.  
>
> ...except that it causes problems that are a bit more serious than "nice 
> to have" because of the ridiculous situation we're in with setuptools  
> and distribute...
>
What's the issue precisely?  Once distribute is on the system, setuptools is
provided by distribute so there's no problem there, correct?

Is it that the installers don't know that there's more than one package
providing the setuptools API?  That sounds like pypi and easy_install aren't
powerful enough to recognize that an API can be provided by multiple
modules.  If you actually want to have a full-blown package manager you'll
need to fix that but at the same time I'd warn that having a full-blown
package manager means having to deal with a lot of corner cases like this.

-Toshio
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