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

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 05:13:16PM +0100, Chris Withers wrote:
> 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 ;-)
>
True... but because of that people are able to specify setuptools in
setup.py and it will work with either distribute or setuptools.  Is what
you're getting at that if people didn't specify setuptools in setup.py,
distribute-0.6 could install without using the setuptools name?  I don't
think that works since you still need to take over the setuptools module
directory so import works inside the code and the setuptools egg-info so
things like plugin modules belonging to setuptools work.

-Toshio
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