On 2009-10-13, Michael Whapples <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > I realise I may be starting something I would prefer not to (looking at > some of the replies of the announcement of setuptools 0.6c10), so I > would like to ask that this tries to stay as a factual thing rather than > a "having a go at the other". > > As it seems that setuptools is not "dead" just possibly a bit slow at > being updated,
Setuptools has effectively been dead for a year. Critical patches were not being applied and there was no hope (till a few days ago) of ever getting them fixed. This goes way beyond "a bit slow at being updated". > could I ask what are the aims of the various projects > setuptools and distribute (please try and keep this information > restricted to your project and what it aims to do)? Setuptools being completely dead (till a few days ago), distribute's aim was basically just to have a working setuptools. So: no differences, except that patches have been applied (and iirc one useful non-intrusive addition of being able to upload sphinx docs to pypi). > It would be nice to > have this information as at the moment its a bit unclear what either > really are trying to offer over the other. I would like to be able to > make a fully informed choice on why use one over the other, I feel at > the moment this isn't possible. Technically both are the same (not looking at the bugfixes). The choice is between open source development and project management styles: PJE's setuptools and Tarek-and-a-lot-of-other-people's distribute. > I have to say from my view (as a developer of my own packages only using > setuptools/distribute to help package my packages) that it currently > looks a horrible mess, distribute tries to replace setuptools and does > it in such a way that any package which specifically wants setuptools > has to use distribute if another package wants it, so not allowing the > one which specifically wants setuptools to get the latest setuptools > (eg. now or soon it will be setuptools 0.6c10). For a globally installed setuptools or distribute: yes, that's a mess. When you use buildout (or pip, apparently) to manage a per-project isolated set of eggs, they will happily coexist (once the 0.6.5 is out with a small fix). So it also depends a bit on the way you set up your project. Reinout -- Reinout van Rees - [email protected] - http://reinout.vanrees.org Software developer at http://www.thehealthagency.com "Military engineers build missiles. Civil engineers build targets" _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
