[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[Daniel Holth]

I tried it out. pip can install setuptools when only pkg_resources is
installed. The only thing stopping it is a small check for whether the
current setuptools is of the distribute variety.

On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 12:53 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 12:12 PM, Marcus Smith <qwcode at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> It would actually be nice if "pkg_resources" and "setuptools-core"
>>> were available as separate PyPI distributions, and setuptools bundled
>>> them together with easy_install. It's a *long* way down the priority
>>> list thing (and will likely never make it to the top, although it may
>>> be more practical once pip vendors the bits it needs).
>>
>>
>> the idea to have pip vendor setuptools crumbles a bit due to console scripts
>> needing pkg_resources.
>> you're left with 2 poor solutions: 1) rewriting script import lines, or 2)
>> still installing setuptools anyway
>>
>> so, having a separate pkg_resources is higher up on the list I think for
>> that reason.
>> without a separate pkg_resources, I think the "dynamic install of
>> setuptools" idea wins out, or no change at all.
>
> I think it's still useful to have pip vendor just pkg_resources (as
> pip.pkg_resources). It's easy, it gives you enough to install wheels,
> and it's not the only thing you would do. It shouldn't make much
> difference whether the vendoring happens before or after
> pkg_resource's separation. The trickiest parts might be adding the
> undeclared pkg_resources / setuptools dependency when appropriate and
> figuring out whether we can install setuptools even if it's not
> available as a wheel.
>
> Meanwhile someone might add a flag or a plugin to setuptools'
> console_scripts handler to generate them in a different way.
>
> I am not worried that 99.9% of pypi-hosted packages depend on
> setuptools or distutils. It is enough to introduce only the
> possibility of getting along without it. For the rest it is
> appropriate to install and use setuptools to build packages that were
> in fact designed to use it.