[Distutils] Annoucing distribute project

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:32 PM 9/24/2008 +0200, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am launching a fork of setuptools. The name is "Distribute". (not 
>definitive) and will be community-driven
>
>This fork will remain 100% compatible with setuptools, and follow 
>closely setuptools evolutions.

Unfortunately, the only way you can remain 100% compatible with code 
"in the field" is by calling your distribution "setuptools" also, or 
by having it also install a dummy setuptools egg or at least 
.egg-info.  Otherwise, packages that declare a dependency to a 
specific setuptools version will cause it to be installed, thereby 
overwriting your package.  There's also setup scripts that use 
ez_setup, which you could work around for easy_install scenarios with 
clever enough monkeypatching, but someone directly running a setup 
script would still break.

If you're going to attempt this, I would consider very carefully how 
you will address these issues, as it seems to me that it would be 
very easy for someone to silently hose their system this way, and 
possibly quite difficult to find out what went wrong or how to fix it.