[Distutils] Comments on PEP 426

[Paul Moore]

On 30 August 2013 00:08, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> We also need to officially bless pip's trick of forcing the use of
> setuptools for distutils based setup.py files.


Do we? What does official blessing imply? We've managed for years without
the trick being "official"...

The main reason it is currently used is to allow setup.py install to
specify --record, so that we can get the list of installed files. If
distutils added a --record flag, for example, I don't believe we'd need the
hack at all. (Obviously, we'd still need setuptools so we could use wheel
to build wheels, but that's somewhat different as it's a new feature).
Maybe a small distutils patch is better than blessing setuptools here?

Forcing setuptools does break some builds. From when I last tried, for
instance, I believe that cx_Oracle won't build with setuptools forced.
Whose issue should that be? Pip's, setuptools', or cx_Oracle's? (Note that
I'm *not* saying that this is a showstopper, just trying to clarify the
intent here).

Note - I'm not against blessing pip's hack. But I'd like it to be clear
what such a blessing *means* and why just leaving it as an internal
implementation detail isn't sufficient.

Paul
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