[Python-Dev] Distutils and Distribute roadmap (and some words on Virtualenv, Pip) (original) (raw)

Tarek Ziadé ziade.tarek at gmail.com
Fri Oct 9 00:55:56 CEST 2009

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 11:28 PM, Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> wrote: [..]

So, without some other intervention, users will continue to follow the instructions with those hundreds of packages (or on those thousands of websites) and manually or automatically try to install setuptools.

I think this will be in the hands of the projects developers : if they start to use Distribute, they will start to document the way to install and use it, and the word will spread eventually.

[..]

Ultimately, to successfully migrate to Distribute is going to require a good understanding of the use cases for easyinstall (primarily those of end users) and for the setuptools API (those of package developers). Those use cases should be documented somehow, either in the roadmap or a reference elsewhere. This is especially true if your intentions are to deprecate the easyinstall command in Distribute 0.7 and if APIs are going to change for package developers. As Antoine points out, pip is not equivalent to easyinstall. BTW, keep in mind that today people also use easyinstall to manage the installation of packages that do not use setuptools.

The choice to deprecate easy_install in 0.7 is done because the Pip project is not far to meet all uses cases easy_install users have, and we're betting on the fact that Pip is active and will be much more advanced that what we could do with a 'new' refactored easy_install by the time 0.7 is ready.

meaning : why doing this work twice ?

Thanks again for your hard work on this, Tarek!

Thanks for the advices

Tarek

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