[Distutils] The problem with Setuptools on Python 3.

[David Cournapeau]

Paul Moore wrote:
>
> Are you saying that you need to use setuptools (or at least the
> feaures of setuptools) to develop setuptools? That's crazy.To run the
> setuptools tests, just run the test.py (or whatever) script. The
> setuptools ability to type python setup.py test, while convenient,
> simply isn't available while you're developing setuptools. The same
> logic applies to *any* setuptools feature that is used in the
> development of setuptools itself. Trying to make it available adds
> lots of complexity for the benefit of very few people (ie, people
> writing the setuptools code).
>
> Bootstrapping like this should be reserved for people writing C
> compilers in C, and other equally major-league projects.
>   

I don't know the details of setuptools, but it is generally quite
tempting to develop a new build/distribution tool using the new build
tool, with some bootstrap process. That's how most build tools I know
work, actually. FWIW, we use this as well in numpy for numpy.distutils
extensions.

And as much as you can count me in the "not a setuptools fan camp", I
think it is easy to say  setuptools code is bad - that's the natural
reaction, really, and I would be surprised if P.J.E would not agree. But
I also think anyone who had to deal with distutils extensions will tell
you the same story - that's inherent to how distutils was conceived (10
years ago) and implemented. The distutils codebase is pretty horrible -
I find m4 macro and 100000 lines of shell code in autoconf easier to
deal with, really. You can deal with it, but it will certainly never be
pretty.

David