Paul Moore wrote: > > Are you saying that you need to use setuptools (or at least the > feaures of setuptools) to develop setuptools? That's crazy.To run the > setuptools tests, just run the test.py (or whatever) script. The > setuptools ability to type python setup.py test, while convenient, > simply isn't available while you're developing setuptools. The same > logic applies to *any* setuptools feature that is used in the > development of setuptools itself. Trying to make it available adds > lots of complexity for the benefit of very few people (ie, people > writing the setuptools code). > > Bootstrapping like this should be reserved for people writing C > compilers in C, and other equally major-league projects. >
I don't know the details of setuptools, but it is generally quite tempting to develop a new build/distribution tool using the new build tool, with some bootstrap process. That's how most build tools I know work, actually. FWIW, we use this as well in numpy for numpy.distutils extensions. And as much as you can count me in the "not a setuptools fan camp", I think it is easy to say setuptools code is bad - that's the natural reaction, really, and I would be surprised if P.J.E would not agree. But I also think anyone who had to deal with distutils extensions will tell you the same story - that's inherent to how distutils was conceived (10 years ago) and implemented. The distutils codebase is pretty horrible - I find m4 macro and 100000 lines of shell code in autoconf easier to deal with, really. You can deal with it, but it will certainly never be pretty. David _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
