[Python-Dev] setuptools in the stdlib

Giovanni Bajo rasky at develer.com
Wed Apr 19 02:12:38 CEST 2006


Fred L. Drake, Jr. <fdrake at acm.org> wrote:

>  > So, I'm not too pleased by insinuations that setuptools is
>  anything other > than a Python community project.
>
> I've no doubt about that at all, FWIW.  I think you've put a lot of
> effort into discussing it with the community, and applaud you for
> that as well as your implementation efforts.


I agree but I have a question for Phil though: why can't many of the setuptools
feature be simply integrated within the existing distutils?

I have been fighting with distutils quite some time and have had to
monkey-patch it somehow to fit my needs. I later discovered that setuptools
included many of those fixes already (let alone the new features). I actually
welcome all those setuptools fixes in the "Just Works(TM)" principle with which
I totally agree.

But, why can't setuptools be gradually merged into distutils, instead of being
kept as a separate package? Let's take a real example: setuptools' sdist is
much enhanced, has integration with CVS/SVN, uses MANIFEST in a way that it
really works, etc. Why can't it be merged into the original distutils? Is it
just for backward compatibility? If so, can't we have some kind of versioning
system?

Giovanni Bajo



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