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

[Chris Withers]

Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> 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?

The issue is that both the setuptools and distribute distributions 
provide a setuptools package. This apparently causes problems, rather 
unsurprisingly ;-)

Chris

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