[Python-Dev] Package install failures in 2.6.3

[P.J. Eby]

At 02:22 PM 10/5/2009 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>Setuptools development has been discontinued for a year, and does
>patches on Distutils code. Some of these patches are sensitive to any change
>made on Distutils, wether those changes are internal or not.

Setuptools is  also not the only thing out there that subclasses 
distutils commands in general, or the build_ext command in 
particular.  Numpy, Twisted, the mx extensions...  there are plenty 
of things out there that subclass distutils commands, quite in 
adherence to the rules.  (Note too that subclassing != patching, and 
the ability to subclass and substitute distutils commands is documented.)

It's therefore not appropriate to treat the issue as if it were 
setuptools-specific; it could have broken any other major (or minor) 
package's subclassing of the build_ext command.