[Python-Dev] Status of packaging in 3.3

[PJ Eby]

On Jun 21, 2012 11:02 AM, "Zooko Wilcox-O&apos;Hearn" <zooko at zooko.com>
wrote:
>
> Philip J. Eby provisionally approved of one of the patches, except for
> some specific requirement that I didn't really understand how to fix
> and that now I don't exactly remember:
>
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2009-January/010880.html
>

I don't remember either; I just reviewed the patch and discussion, and I'm
not finding what the holdup was, exactly.  Looking at it now, it looks to
me like a good idea...  oh wait, *now* I remember the problem, or at least,
what needs reviewing.

Basically, the challenge is that it doesn't allow an .egg in a PYTHONPATH
directory to take precedence over that *specific* PYTHONPATH directory.

With the perspective of hindsight, this was purely a transitional concern,
since it only *really* mattered for site-packages; anyplace else you could
just delete the legacy package if it was a problem.  (And your patch works
fine for that case.)

However, for setuptools as it was when you proposed this, it was a
potential backwards-compatibility problem.  My best guess is that I was
considering the approach for 0.7...  which never got any serious
development time.

(It may be too late to fix the issue, in more than one sense.  Even if the
problem ceased to be a problem today, nobody's going to re-evaluate their
position on setuptools, especially if their position wasn't even based on a
personal experience with the issue.)
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