Hi there, Normally setuptools is installed system-wide. When you install an egg using easy_install, the egg itself can count on setuptools being available, and use for instance its resource management API and namespace package marking facility. It therefore is unnecessary to users to mark setuptools as a dependency to their eggs in setup.py. Since it's unnecessary, it'll just not be done.
This works fine in the case of system-wide installation of setuptools, but when installing eggs locally, such as in Buildout, this can lead to problems. Buildout makes sure that only eggs that are dependencies are importable when starting up a script. An egg that is depending on setuptools implicitly will therefore not have access to setuptools facilities. Telling everybody who makes eggs that use setuptools to please take Buildout into account and include setuptools as an explicit dependency in setup.py seems like a hopeless exercise, as things will just plain work for most egg users and developers, at least until the possible eventuality of Buildout reaching critical mass in the community. What would work for Buildout, and as far as I can see does no harm to everybody else, is to make setuptools an implicit dependency of all eggs. It won't affect anyone else (but for a hopefully tiny performance impact) as setuptools is definitely available on the system when installing the egg through easy_install anyway. So, would this be something that could be added to setuptools? Regards, Martijn _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
