[Python-Dev] Easy, uncontroversial setuptools->distutils tasks (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Sat Apr 22 02:45:51 CEST 2006

This is for the folks who wanted to get their feet wet with the setuptools codebase...

Setuptools has 4 "convenience" commands that can be trivially ported to the distutils, and 3 of those shouldn't require anything more than copying the code, translating the docs from reST to LaTeX, and changing a couple of imports from 'setuptools' to 'distutils'.

The four commands are: alias, rotate, saveopts and setopt. Porting 'alias' will also require you to merge a few lines of alias expansion code from setuptools.dist.Distribution._parse_command_opts() into the corresponding class in distutils.dist, but the others should be entirely self-contained. One of the commands also currently runs the "egg_info" command, but that's just to support setuptools' version-tagging features, which I'm not proposing be ported at the moment.

These aren't exactly critical features; they're really just conveniences for people that work with the distutils a lot. Not really setuptools' main audience, in other words. ;) But getting these commands moved over in 2.5 would take away a few hundred lines of code from setuptools and thereby make it about 5% less scary by line count, and about 15% less scary by module count. :)

The reference documentation for these commands is in reST format in trunk/sandbox/setuptools.txt. And speaking of the sandbox, if anybody wants to update setuptools.command.init so it doesn't include these commands when running under 2.5, that counts for extra credit. That is, it means you'll have worked on setuptools itself as well as the distutils. :)

Any takers? Better hurry, 'cause these modules will go fast. :) It'll probably take you longer to edit the docs than to change the code.

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