[Distutils] [Python-Dev] At least one package management tool for 2.7

[Tarek Ziadé]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 11:27 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2010-03-24 17:19 PM, Tarek Ziadé wrote:
>
>> BTW, That makes me wonder how hard it would be to make it use a plain
>> "python setup.py install" call
>> instead, to remove the easy_install dependency ?  Since it could
>> simply loop into each dependency
>
> Some packages use setuptools and some don't. Since setuptools changes the
> behavior of the install command to install .eggs, those packages need extra
> flags to use pip's preferred flat installs. Using easy_install (with the
> right flags) yields consistent behavior for all packages.

That's just an environment problem.

Notice that I've never tried it, but this could be done by properly
configuring the default behavior of easy_install globally (with the
distutils.cfg file for instance since its a distutils command) so it
behaves like pip wants when "python setup.py install" is called.

Plus, it would fix the fact that a system that use easy_install *and*
pip may have some problems. For example, when the first one is used to
install a package and the other one to upgrade it, it may not work as
expected.

In any case, calling easy_install via pip to do a flat install with no
deps, basically means that you use a very small
subset of the setuptools or distribute you could technically replace.
Besides a heavy, non-future proof dependency I don't see any benefit.

Tarek
-- 
Tarek Ziadé | http://ziade.org