[SciPy-dev] weave.inline broken by setuptools?

[David Cournapeau]

Fernando Perez wrote:
>
> It may well be that there are reasons why setuptools can't avoid to
> monkeypatch, I don't know.  But it seems to me that this particular
> issue stems from the monkeypatching and  not because of subclassing.

Yes, it is because of monkeypatching, but setuptools needs to monkey
patch Distribution to handle some things with eggs at least (and
possibly other things which I am not aware of).

There are also things which are not monkey-patch per se, but are related
to mungling with sys.path, although it is not involved in the precise
case you are showing (but explain a lot of breakings of setuptools, at
least in my own experience).

Robert is right: most of setuptools ugliness comes from distutils (and
lack of proper features from python itself). Not only is it difficult to
extend distutils by design, but it is also difficult to reuse parts of
it on your own extensions (because there are long functions with data
embedded in the code; see for example msvccompiler for some fun). That's
the whole problem: the only way to be clean is to avoid distutils, but
avoiding distutils means nobody will use the tool.

cheers,

David