Future of setuptools and distribute in MacPorts

[Akira Kitada]

Hi,

There has been a long discussion at Python-Dev mailing list about
setuptools and distribute.

setuptools is a Python package for building module and has been widely
used in Python world.
It's really popular but known as rather 'closed'; Only a few can work
on the code and there're bug ports
in the tracker. Tarek Ziadé, one of the Python committer thought this
is not right and started
his setuptools fork project, 'Distribute'.

Distribute is compatible with setuptools, just better. The community
is active and lots of bugs in
setuptools are fixed and it even runs in Python 3.x.

A few days ago, Python 2.6.3 was released and the found that it does
not work well with setuptools,
where as Distribute works file with it.
Lots of reports have been submitted to Python list but setuptools
hasn't updated still.

So, I think it's clear that we need to have Distribute in MacPorts, but how?
Gentoo, for example, provide Distribute under the name of 'setuptools'.
Is this a right solution for MacPorts? I personally think that's the
way, because
Distribute is just another name of setuptools with bug fixes and the
two cannot be
installed at the same time and MacPorts's dependency system does not allow us
to do that other than treating both in the same port name.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks.