[Distutils] distribute does not install with python3 on Ubuntu machine

[Lennart Regebro]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 7:25 AM, Marius Gedminas <marius at pov.lt> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 02:14:12PM -0700, Lennart Regebro wrote:
>> On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Giulio Genovese
>> <giulio.genovese at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > sudo pip-3.2 install --upgrade distribute
>> > I get this:
>> > "File "setuptools/dist.py", line 103
>> >    except ValueError, e:
>>
>> You can't upgrade distribute with pip under Python 3. This is a known problem.
>>
>> https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/650
>>
>> > I think the problem is that with someone recently forgot to put the
>> > parentheses (i.e. "except ValueError, e:" should be "except (ValueError,
>> > e):") and therefore this does not work anymore with python3.
>>
>> No, the syntax under Python 3 is except ValueError as 3, but that
>> doesn't work with Python 2.4 and Python 2.5 and we are still
>> supporting them.
>>
>> > It should be easy to fix.
>>
>> It isn't. The solution is to not try to upgrade distribute with pip
>> under Python 3. Uninstall it and install it again instead.
>
> Wouldn't merging Vinay's distribute3 branch fix this?

I don't think we should stop using 2to3 until we drop support for 2.5,
which we haven't done yet. The codebase is very brittle, so
conservatism is appropriate. I think the new setuptools + distribute
branch could be the right place to do this, but that's up to the
setuptools maintainers.

//Lennart