[Distutils] [Python-Dev] At least one package management tool for 2.7

[P.J. Eby]

At 05:27 PM 3/24/2010 -0500, Robert Kern wrote:
>Since setuptools changes the behavior of the install command to 
>install .eggs, those packages need extra flags to use pip's 
>preferred flat installs. Using easy_install (with the right flags) 
>yields consistent behavior for all packages.

Technically, those flags cause setuptools to *not* use easy_install, 
but rather to use more-or-less plain vanilla distutils 
installation.  I haven't looked at pip's code, but I doubt it's 
relying on easy_install at all.

Heck, apart from maybe needing pkg_resources to do some parsing and 
the like, I'd be surprised if pip needs setuptools at all.  Ian's 
said it doesn't use setuptools.package_index to find the packages, so 
that doesn't leave a whole lot for setuptools to do, except maybe 
generate the .egg-info when you're running on Python <2.5.