[Python-Dev] a new setuptools release? (original) (raw)

Sridhar Ratnakumar sridharr at activestate.com
Wed Oct 7 22:43:20 CEST 2009

On Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:35:18 -0700, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:

At 07:27 PM 10/7/2009 +0200, M.-A. Lemburg wrote: Having more competition will also help, e.g. ActiveState's PyPM looks promising (provided they choose to open-source it) and then there's pip. Note that both PyPM and pip use setuptools as an important piece of their implementation (as does buildout), so they are technically the competition of easyinstall, rather than setuptools per se. IOW, putting setuptools in the stdlib wouldn't be declaring a victor in the installation tools competition, it'd simply be providing infrastructure for (present and future) tools to build on.

PyPM client relies on pkg_resources only[1]. Specifically for

  1. the version comparison algorithm:

    $ grep pkg_resources pypm/client/version.py import pkg_resources return cmp(pkg_resources.parse_version(pkg1.version), pkg_resources.parse_version(pkg2.version))

  2. parsing the "install_requires" string:

    $ grep parse pypm/client/dependency.py return [pkg_resources.Requirement.parse(reqstring)

Both these features are definitely worthy of addition to stdlib but only
after standardizing them (like PEP 376 does with .egg-info structure and
files list). Now that Distribute is getting some visibility, it will be
extremely good for the community to add distribute-0.7 (which would
include the above two features apart from others) to the stdlib.

-srid

[1] The backend code (our mirroring component) also uses
setuptools.package_index

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