On Jul 13, 2013, at 3:35 PM, Marcus Smith <qwc...@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> As you're aware I think it makes the most sense to just bundle setuptools 
> wholesale. This makes it impossible to "break" pip by something going wrong 
> in setuptools causing it to be uninstalled and means that for users who are 
> only doing installs, they don't need setuptools installed just pip.
> 
> I'm a fan of bundling too (if it works), but the "dynamic install of 
> setuptools" idea also offers what you mention, although admittedly with more 
> fragility.   If a user uninstalled setuptools, it would be installed again 
> when needed,  and users only need pip to get started, and don't have to think 
> about the setuptools dependency themselves.   
> 
> The drawbacks of bundling setuptools:
> 1) maybe some weird bug/side-effect shows up after we do it (ok, maybe that's 
> FUD)
> 2) users can't upgrade themselves (for use in pip)
> 3) more tedium in our release process.
> 4) feels odd to bundle it knowing we'd likely drop it later, if we do the 
> MEBs thing.
> 
> Marcus


1) That's kinda FUD-y yea ;) But I'd say it's equally as likely to have weird 
bugs/side effects due to people using different combinations of pip/setuptools 
with pip than we've tested.

2) This much is true, the question then becomes how important is that? If 
there's a major regression in setuptools that needs fixed I'd think we'd 
release an updated pip. If there's new functionality I would guess we'd need to 
expose that in pip anyways.

3) I think this isn't as big of a deal as it sounds. Especially given we can 
write tooling to make it simpler :)

4) Even if MEBs were here *right now* we'd still have nearly 150k source dists 
that required setuptools. So either in the MEB system we'd be grabbing 
setuptools *a lot* or we could just bundle it to provide a better UX for people 
using the large corpus of existing software. I think it will be a long time 
once the MEBs exist before they gain enough traction that even the bulk of 
installs are using that system. MEBs depend on sdist 2.0 which hasn't even been 
started yet ;)


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Donald Stufft
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