[Distutils] Packaging situation + mailing list rules

[P.J. Eby]

At 07:29 PM 7/3/2010 +0900, David Cournapeau wrote:
>  Besides the numerous technical issues, this is just basic decency. If
>  I were PJE, I would be very mad.

I'm not mad at it being provided with a compatible API.  However, I 
*am* very unhappy with the fact that the version of distribute that's 
being shipped with OS distributions is both packaged as (e.g.) 
"python-setuptools", AND prevents people from installing the real 
setuptools, even in a local directory!

So, David, I hope you've filed this as a bug report with both 
Distribute and Ubuntu, and that others will do the same for any other 
distribution that's shipping distribute under a misleading name and 
that has this behavior.

My understanding when this was discussed previously, was that 
distribute would *only* suppress the installation of setuptools 
versions released *before* the corresponding version of distribute.

Also, considering how widespread the "setuptools isn't being 
maintained" lie is at this point, I'm a bit concerned that some OS 
distributors may have been unduly influenced by it in their switching 
decisions.

My understanding (and I would guess, that of the OS distributors' as 
well) was *also* based on the premise that distribute was going to 
track with setuptools' feature additions and bug fixes, which it 
clearly has not.  The 0.6c11 release (last October) fixed a rather 
long list of bugs besides the one you reported; does anyone know if 
the rest are actually fixed in Distribute?