[Distutils] small distribute improvement

[Ian Bicking]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 6:20 AM, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it is confusing that
> easy_install blah
>
> doesn't do anything, and doesn't provide any clue, if it was to do an
> update.  You need to say
> easy_install -U blah
>
> There are a few choices here.  One might be that
> easy_install blah
> could notify you that an update is available.

pip works somewhat similarly (it won't do anything in this case), but
in the tip it will say "Requirement already satisfied (use --upgrade
to upgrade): blah".  It doesn't actually check if an upgrade is
available though.  It actually keeps track of why something is
installed, so it can tell the difference between something installed
from the command line and installed as a requirement of some other
package (where you definitely want to quickly pass over satisfied
requirements).

On the other hand, I find it useful sometimes to test things manually
knowing the behavior is the same on the command line as with
install_requires.

-- 
Ian Bicking  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org  |  http://topplabs.org/civichacker