[Distutils] How to force installing setuptools instead of distribute ?

David Cournapeau cournape at gmail.com
Thu Jul 1 09:12:23 CEST 2010


On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Éric Araujo <merwok at netwok.org> wrote:
> Hello
>
> [David]
>> Distribute broke basic features of easy_install, which makes it
>> useless for my case (see for example #142).
> Is that http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/142 ?
> IIUC, distribute wanted to be a superset of setuptools, so bug fixes in
> setuptools are supposed to go into distribute too. I’m not sure
> distribute will still have the same momentum though, since we’re in the
> process of taking good ideas out of it and adding them to distutils2 to
> make a cleaner base for distribution (package) management in Python: see
> http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/the-fate-of-distutils-pycon-summit-packaging-sprint-detailed-report/

Hm, that's a bit different from my understanding, but that's a bit
irresponsible of Ubuntu to provide distribute if it does not get at
least the bug fixes which go into setuptools. Maybe there is a
miscommunication here, dunno. I thought the point of distribute was to
get bug fixes that setuptools maintainers did not take care of.

>
>> Also, as a rule, I like to be in control of what I use as a programmer
>> if I wish so, and the whole business of distribute claiming to be
>> setuptools is really obnoxious.
> You’re perfectly entitled to do that. distribute does provide
> setuptools, so it seems normal that it would say so. (Had Python a
> package manager, distribute would “provide” the setuptools package while
> still allowing people to choose between the two implementations. I think
> it was not feasible.)

If distribute were called distribute, it would have enabled people who
want to use it to use it. But what's done is done :)

> Well, probably because they wanted to use a version with more bugs fixed
> and new features (e.g. 3.x support).

Sure, it had to be done since so many packages depend on setuptools.

I just hope that more care were taken in the whole situation, because
those tools are so pervasive that even developers who don't use them
have to support them (through virtualenv, easy_install, etc...).
Setuptools already caused me a lot of trouble as a numpy/scipy
maintainer, and distribute makes it even worse at the moment.

David


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