[Distutils] Package install failures in 2.6.3 - setuptools vs Distribute

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 7:00 PM, Bill Janssen <janssen at parc.com> wrote:
> For me, it's more a matter of "OS X 10.6 already comes with setuptools;
> how can I mitigate the impact of this buggy unmaintained package on the
> systems I'm building to deploy on OS X?".  Adding distribute to the mix,
> however good it is, doesn't help; I'm going to use a pure distutils
> solution.  And I can't really install a bugfix release for the Python
> frameworks in /System; only Apple can do that.

I fear the canonical answer to this problem is: Don't use the system
Python on Mac OS.

It's not particular satisfactory, but as you noticed nobody besides
Apple can fix problems in this Python install or update it to newer
versions. Apple started to include quite a number of projects, like
dateutil, Twisted, NumPy, zope.interface and setuptools to name a few.
They will probably update those the next time in Mac OS 10.7 in one or
two years. Even today the packages they ship are already outdated and
miss bug fixes.

So if you want to deploy to Mac OS, I fear the answer is to encourage
people to install a good pristine Python version instead. Be that the
official GUI installer, Macports, Fink or building your own Python
from source. The installers for the Plone application include a full
Python build for that reason.

Hanno