[Python-Dev] a new setuptools release?

[Sridhar Ratnakumar]

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 easy_install, 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