[Python-Dev] setuptools in 2.5. (original) (raw)

Ian Bicking ianb at colorstudy.com
Thu Apr 20 21:41:36 CEST 2006

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

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