[Distutils] pip install --upgrade bug on python3.x

[Vinay Sajip]

Paul Moore <p.f.moore <at> gmail.com> writes:

> The problem is that distribute supports Python 2.4 and up. Until they
> drop support for at least 2.4 and 2.5, they don't stand a chance of
> moving away from 2to3 to a single-source model (and even then, it's a
> lot of work for little benefit so they may not want to take that step
> anyway). It's the 2to3 process that's the issue here.

Actually, when I was working on the venv stuff, the time it took to install
distribute in a venv was annoyingly high because of 2to3 (and because I was doing
a lot of this while testing). So I created a fork of distribute called
distribute3, at

https://bitbucket.org/vinay.sajip/distribute3

which works on Python 2.x and 3.x from a single code base. I hadn't looked at
testing it with 2.4, but I did just now, and after a couple of tweaks all the
tests pass bar one which tries to write into a system site-packages location
(the same failure on 2.4 and 2.5, no failures on 2.6 and later - probably a
distutils issue which got fixed).

I didn't bother suggesting to upstream about merging my changes, since it's a
critical piece of infrastructure and "all tests pass" only means so much. But
a single code base, even supporting 2.4, seems achievable.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip