[Distutils] buildout 2 craziness: bootstrap.py doesn't do enough

[Chris Withers]

On 05/04/2013 12:48, Jim Fulton wrote:
>> My guess as to what happened: I was using python2.7 (which is EPD,
>> containing a tonne of packages including an older version of xlrd).
>
> BTW, I have no idea what EPD means.

Enthought Python Distribution, I should emphasise *was* using above...

>> Since that xlrd was getting picked instead of the one in the develop line
>> (wasn't that bug supposed to be fixed in buildout 2?!)
>
> There was quite a bit of discussion about this recently and there
> was no consensus that develop eggs should be preferred to
> over non-develop eggs with higher versions.

The non-develop eggs here have significantly *lower* version numbers.
(and really, if I say I'm developing a package, why would a 
non-development version be picked?!)

>> At times like this (when I've just wasted 1.5hrs chasing my tail) I really
>> truly hate buildout :-(
>
> It's times like this that I really really hate it when people insist on using
> dirty Pythons when they should know better.

Two comments, the first an order of magnitude more important than the 
second:

1. I *was using a clean python*. Buildout decided to use some crap *it* 
left lying around from a totally different Python installation when I 
ran python2.6<clean, build form source> bootstrap.py

2. There is some practicality here. EPD provides suitable versions of a 
tonne of packages I can't and often don't even want to try compiling 
from source. Unfortunately, it provides some packages of which I want 
newer versions. I know this is a hard problem, one that Gary Poster 
tried to solve, and I appreciate that implementation didn't turn out well...

cheers,

Chris

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