[Distutils] The problem with Setuptools on Python 3.

[P.J. Eby]

At 06:02 PM 4/20/2009 +0200, Lennart Regebro wrote:
>On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 17:07, P.J. Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> > I still don't understand why you can't have a setup3.py that uses only
> > distutils, in order to run the build2to3 on.  Am I missing something?
>
>Well, the question then becomes why not just depends on distutils all
>the way? With a setup3.py that does this, most of the work for
>removing this self-dependency is done.
>
> >  python3 setup3.py build_2to3
> >  cd wherevertheoutputgoes
> >  python3 setup.py test  (or whatever)
>
>Well, first of all the distutils build command doesn't include the
>files needed, such as setup.py, and also it doesn't copy the txt files
>that is the doctests. So it would need an extended version of
>build_py_2to3 that does copy these files. And instead of doing "cd
>wherever, python2 setup.py test", we can just as well just do a custom
>command that runs the custom build_py_2to3 and runs the tests from
>there too.
>
>So in fact, what you are suggesting here is almost exactly what I'm
>suggesting, except that I don't see the point in confusing and
>complicating things by keeping the old setup.py.

Because that's the one that generates the metadata setuptools needs 
to run, test itself, etc.