[Python-Dev] BDFL pronouncement?

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 5:01 PM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>
>> I'm saying that I don't expect setuptools 0.7 to appear before Tarek's
>> Distribute is mature and in widespread use. IOW I support Tarek's fork
>> and suggest nobody hold their breath waiting for setuptools 0.7.
>
> Well, if this was the BDFL pronouncement that a lot of people have taken it
> to be, does that allow Martin von Lewis to give the keys to
> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools to the "distribute" developers, so we
> can get on and use the original "setuptools" name without all the confusion
> and hackery needed to make "distribute" work?
>

I am -1 on this.

At Python and PyPI level, 'Setuptools' is PJE's project and he's the
one that manages the list of users that have
extended rights on his project.

In Distribute, our setup.py script makes sure setuptools is not in the
way. It is explicit and documented,
and there's a documentation explaining how to switch back to Setuptools.

This exists only because there's no way yet in Python to say that a
distribution can't run when another distribution is installed.

But it's up to every project and developer to choose to switch to
Distribute. And it's up to OS packagers to choose
the best strategy at their levels when they package tools for their
packaging system (so they pick one or the other
and they are able to make a distinction between PJE python
distribution and ours)

Distribute developers will of course promote Distutils usage
everywhere, but hijacking setuptools in PyPI
would be a very bad thing imho.

Tarek