Future of setuptools and distribute in MacPorts

[Bryan Blackburn]

On Thu, Oct 08, 2009 at 02:09:29AM +0900, Akira Kitada said:
> 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.

I patched py26-setuptools in r58886 to deal with 2.6.3's changed distutils,
so as long as you have 0.6c9_1 you should be fine.

> 
> 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.

Moving over to distribute is one possibility, but the discussion on (at
least) distutils-sig seems like the python community hasn't quite decided on
where things are going yet...at least with the patched setuptools things
should still work as well as they have until we have a clearer overall idea
of where things will be going.

Note that I also added py26-distribute, but as you note it does conflict
with py26-setuptools, so moving to it would be painful.  Maybe it can be the
preferred one for py27 ports?

Bryan

> 
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> Thanks.