[Distutils] distlib updated - comments sought

[Matthias Klose]

On 05.10.2012 19:24, Paul Moore wrote:
> On 5 October 2012 17:04, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> ~1300 of the ~20000 packages on pypi have trouble using setup.py as
>> their build system / metadata source format.
> 
> That's interesting information. Do you know in what way they have
> trouble with setup.py? Do they not use it at all, do they need
> features it doesn't provide, or what?
> 
>> For the ~1300 broken packages, distutils is awful because it is not
>> really extensible, though setuptools tried.
> 
> Yeah, that's the common complaint. Plus, "it's too extensible" :-)
> (From people trying to change it who have to deal with all the fancy
> hacks people have done).
> 
>> People have to install setuptools against their will because there is
>> only one implementation of the pkg_resources API and 75% of the
>> packages on pypi require setuptools.
> 
> I wish we could separate pkg_resources and setuptools. I'd love to
> know which packages needed each (but I suspect that's not a question
> that can be answered without looking at the actual code). Ignoring the
> egg support aspects, pkg_resources is something that could be replaced
> - a reasonable proportion of distlib offers alternatives to the
> pkg_resources code, and more could be added. On the other hand,
> setuptools per se is almost entirely a build time facility, so
> shouldn't be needed at runtime (and so using it for build should be
> relatively unimportant).

Debian and Ubuntu have a (deb) binary package python-pkg-resources.

817 packages do use python-setuptools for the build, and 340 binary packages do
depend on python-pkg-resources. so it's not just a few, but nearly 50%.

see apt-cache rdepends python-pkg-resources for the full list.

  Matthias

PS: are there really ~20000 packages on pypi, or do you count old versions too?