[Python-Dev] setuptools in 2.5.

[Ian Bicking]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> skip at pobox.com wrote:
>>Maybe they know something we don't.
> 
> oh, please.  it's not like people like myself and MAL don't know anything
> about package distribution...
> 
> (why is it that people who *don't* distribute stuff are a lot more im-
> pressed by a magic tool than people who've spent the last decade
> distributing stuff ?  has it ever occurred to you that we know some-
> thing that you don't ?)

There's many people packaging and distributing code with setuptools, but 
very few of them are on this list.  Setuptools has gotten quite a lot of 
use and a lot of pushback from people, but only from the people who have 
been using it.  People who have complained about Setuptools without 
using it have had little influence, because most of their suggestions 
are only resolvable by having Setuptools simply cease to exist, which is 
not very constructive.  But even then, I've seen Phillip make many 
changes to Setuptools based on feedback from people who just wanted 
Setuptools to get out of their way; but again, you have to at least be 
using it to give this kind of feedback.

And somewhat tangential, but related to much of this discussion: if 
Phillip had been doing developments for distutils all this time instead 
of making a package that was separately installable under a different 
name, Setuptools would never have gotten the use and feedback that is 
has so far received.  We could turn this into a discussion about how to 
handle updates to the standard library, but given the constraints I 
think Setuptools was developed in the best way possible.  If development 
had happened here on python-dev and released to the large community only 
with the next Python release, Setuptools would be far inferior to its 
current state.

And now for a little pushback the other way -- as of this January 
TurboGears has served up 100,000 egg files (I'm not sure what the window 
for all those downloads is, but it hasn't been very long).  Has it 
occurred to you that they know something you don't about distribution? 
ElementTree would be among those egg files, so you should also consider 
how many people *haven't* asked you about problems related to the 
installation process.


-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org