[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[Donald Stufft]

On Jul 19, 2013, at 12:39 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> 
> On Jul 19, 2013, at 12:23 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> I like the idea of switching to zc.buildout style entry points - it
>> makes it easier to get pip to a point where "no setuptools" means "can
>> only install from wheel files" rather than "can't install anything"
>> (that way pip can install setuptools from a wheel if it needs to build
>> something else from source).
> 
> I plan on making pip bundle setuptools regardless.
> 
> To underline how important that is, it's been discovered (though we are still working out _why_) that pip 1.3.1 on python 3.x+ is broken with setuptools 0.7+. Historically we haven't tested old versions of pip against new versions of setuptools (and with how quickly setuptools is releasing now a days that matrix is going to become very big very fast).
> 
> Bundling setuptools makes things way more stable and alleviates a lot of long term support headaches.
> 
> Also just to be specific entry points don't require setuptools, they require pkg_resources which currently is installed as part of setuptools but can likely be split out.
> 
> -----------------
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
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Just to expand a bit here. I think the only reason this worked at all historically is because setuptools hadn't changed much in the last few years so there wasn't much chance for regression.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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