[Tutor] Question about distribute in pypi

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 27 December 2013 13:53, Albert-Jan Roskam <fomcl at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  Subject: Re: [Tutor] Question about distribute in pypi
>  To: "daedae11" <daedae11 at 126.com>
>  Cc: tutor at python.org
>  Date: Friday, December 27, 2013, 8:19 AM
>
>  On Thu, Dec 26, 2013 at 11:06 PM,
>  daedae11 <daedae11 at 126.com>
>  wrote:
>  > Are distribute 0.6.49 and distribute 0.7.3 the same
>  plugin's different
>  > version?
>
>  distribute is a fork of setuptools. The fork was merged
>  back, so for a
>  fresh installation of Python just install setuptools. The
>  0.7.3
>  package updates an existing distribute installation to the
>  latest
>  version of setuptools.
>
> ===> That's good to know. I always thought that setuptools had become sort of obsolete (though still widely used).

At one point it was said to be obsolete. Over time it has become
apparent that it's really not possible at this stage to reorganise
pypi so that it is based on something radically different from
setuptools and there isn't much benefit in having a confusing array of
similar alternatives. The decision was made to focus all "official"
packaging development effort in one place: setuptools.

> So would it be fair to conclude that setuptools is now the winner of all those packaging tools?
> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6344076/differences-between-distribute-distutils-setuptools-and-distutils2

Yes.

> I checked distutils2 on pypi. Last updated March 2012 IIRC. Died during alpha phase, it seems. I tried it once but experienced problems with a very basic script.

Distutils2 and packaging are the same thing but one was for Python 3.x
and the other was a backport to Python 2.x. Both efforts are now
abandoned.

Likewise distribute has been merged into setuptools and abandoned.
Theoretically the most recent setuptools releases are an "upgrade"
compared with the most recent distribute releases. Development effort
for distribute is abandoned.

There are both good and bad things about setuptools but I think that
what the developers in these different efforts have now realised is
that it's just not currently possible to reorganise pypi because the
current setup couples too much unrelated functionality into the same
libraries: distutils and setuptools. Recent effort has been focussed
on providing PEPs and protocols for each part of the packaging process
so that it is possible for new packaging libraries/tools to be
interchangeable with existing ones.


Oscar