[Python-Dev] Raising objections (original) (raw)

Walter Dörwald walter at livinglogic.de
Wed Apr 19 09:11:37 CEST 2006

Anthony Baxter wrote:

On Wednesday 19 April 2006 16:22, Walter Dörwald wrote:

If I'm not calling shared libraries from Python I can ignore ctypes. If I'm not doing XML, I can ignore elementtree. If I'm not doing SQL I can ignore pysqlite and if I'm not interested in profiling I can ignore cProfile. But setuptools will potentially affect anyone that uses third-party modules/packages. Sure. It might mean people can automatically install something like TurboGears and all it's dependencies, without stuffing their existing required versions (thanks to eggs) and without having to fetch 16 different packages. Oh, the horror!

I'm not saying that setuptools doesn't fix a real problem. It does! I'm just saying that for something that might have this far reaching consequences, the "why" and "how" should be documented somewhere. And this "somewhere" shouldn't be the depths of the distutils-SIG archives.

And ctypes, elementtree and pysqlite are mature packages. setuptools isn't even finished yet. Neither is distutils. setuptools at least is likely to be "finished", whatever that means.

Wouldn't I need at least have to change "from distutils.core import setup" to "from setuptools import setup"? Or to something like: Nope, only if you want to use the new, nicer functionality. If you want to stick with the status quo, you're quite welcome to.

After two failed attempts to use setuptools for my own projects, I'd still like to use it, but this seems difficult (maybe this has changed since then, so correct me if I'm wrong): I'd like to distribute my modules as modules inside the top-level ll package. With distutils I can put the package init.py into either a separate distributing archive or into the core distribution archive and ignore the warning given by setup.py for the other packages. With setuptools this doesn't work, because the package is distributed over multiple egg-directories. AFAICR setuptools has a solution for this, but only if the package init.py is empty (because setuptools generates it). But I'd like to put at least a useful docstring into this init.py.

Servus, Walter

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