Future of setuptools and distribute in MacPorts

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 7, 2009, at 12:09, Akira Kitada wrote:

> 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.

py26-distribute was recently added to MacPorts.

Ports can declare conflicts with other ports now, as of MacPorts  
1.8.0. py26-distribute does declare that it conflicts with py26- 
setuptools.

We could modify all ports that currently depend on py26-setuptools so  
that they could work with either py26-setuptools or py26-distribute,  
by using a path:-style dependency instead of a port:-style one. Or is  
py26-distribute a superset of py26-setuptools, to be preferred in all  
cases?