[Distutils] need guidance on state-of-the-art for "entry points"

[Doug Hellmann]

Dear Fellowship,

I am starting a new project which will be heavily extensible using plugins defined in other people's packages over which I have little or no control. I was planning to use setuptools entry points to manage the plugin discovery, since it has worked so well for virtualenvwrapper. However, in the process of searching for current documentation to reference in the project documentation, I got lost and confused about what is currently supported and what is deprecated.

Can someone tell me the currently approved way to work with a modern version of entry points? Should I continue to use distribute/setuptools as before? Should I move to distutils2 and some new metadata in the setup.cfg file? Should I be using Tarek's "extensions" package? If so, how do I tell distutils2 to run the registration code during installation?

Thanks,
Doug