[Distutils] distribute and buildout: best practices?

[Jim Fulton]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 1:30 PM, Tres Seaver <tseaver at palladion.com> wrote:
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> Reinout van Rees wrote:
>> On 2009-10-09, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
>>> Reinout van Rees wrote:
>>>> I'm still not 100% sure whether it is safe to put "distribute" in the
>>>> install_requires list of a package right now, however.
>>> As with setuptools, why do you think you need to?
>>
>> Namespace packages.  You get warnings "hey, no setuptools dependency" once you
>> use namespaces.
>
> That is a buildout bug:  whining about the lack of depenedency on the
> only package which makes dependencies meaningful is silly.  No package
> should *ever* need to declare that it depends on setuptools.

I disagree. Dependencies only matter for installation.  Lots of
packages that are installed with setuptools don't need setuptools in
their path to run.  If a package imports setuptools, it should declare
it as a dependency.  The distribute fork and masquerade of setuptools
makes this more complicated than it should be.   Really the run-time
code needed to support namespace packages should be split out into a
separate package and eventually added to the standard library.

Jim

-- 
Jim Fulton