[Distutils] Setuptools should not depend on setuptools.

[P.J. Eby]

At 04:50 PM 3/11/2009 +0100, Lennart Regebro wrote:
>When porting setuptools to Python 3, I recently looked into doing the
>3.0 development a bit nicer, by being able to run 2to3 as a part of
>the installation or test commands. However, this turns out to be
>impossible, because every part of setuptools assumes that setuptools
>is available and working. This also means, even under Python 2.x
>development, that should you break for example the dist module a bit
>too much, setuptools stops working, and you can't even run the tests.
>
>Therefore, one thing that should be done is to make setuptools not
>depend on setuptools. Building, installoing, testing, should require
>disutils only.

Distutils doesn't have a "test" command...  let alone an egg_info command.

It might be easier to have a "build_py" option to run 2to3 on stuff 
in the build directory, and a "test" variant that runs against the 
build tree instead of the source tree...  and runs under Python 3 
instead of 2.  It's easier to see (at least for me) how something 
like that could potentially work, than how to make setuptools not 
depend on itself.