[Distutils] Distutils BOF at PyCon 2004

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 12:32 PM 3/19/04 -0500, Fred L. Drake, Jr. wrote:
>I've added a proposed list of topics for a Distutils BOF for PyCon:
>
>     http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/DistutilsBof
>
>If anyone would like to add to the list or expand on it, or add their name to
>it as planning to attend, that would be great.

FYI, with respect to the "bundling distutils extensions with small 
distributions" issue raised on the above page, my current plan is to create 
a "bootstrap" module from which a setup.py can import a function (e.g. 
'from use_setuptools import require_version') that will check whether the 
desired version of setuptools is present on sys.path, and if not, download 
and extract it into the same directory as the setup.py script.  In this 
way, it would not be necessary to distribute the entire setuptools 
distribution with a small package, just the one bootstrap file.  Meanwhile, 
if somebody wants to avoid the repeated downloads of setuptools when 
installing small packages, they could always install it directly.

It's not a perfect solution, but it's one that could be used as a stopgap 
until setuptools-like capabilities are present in the stdlib.