setuptools status

[Andrew Pantyukhin]

On 6/11/07, Andrew Pantyukhin <infofarmer at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 6/11/07, Alexander Botero-Lowry <alexbl at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > > Python modules are slowly moving from distutils
> > > to setuptools. I have no python experience, but
> > > I see that this causes serious and annoying
> > > problems for newer ports.
> >
> > Are you referring to the OSRELEASE problem, or are you referring to the
> > intra-port egg dependency problem?
>
> I'm referring to the general mess with all these
> eggs. For now I'm patching ports to revert back
> to distutils, but it's not completely compatible
> with setuptools.
>
> > > Is there someone willing to identify and attempt
> > > to solve the problems?
> > We have ok solutions for many of these problems; it's hard to do anything
> > better (or simply impossible) in some cases. In other cases the update to
> > Python 2.5 (which I started fixing on and miwi@ is helping out with)
> > includes considerably better support for setuptools.
>
> It's great to know that!

I wanted to ask some specific questions today, but
after diving into the dark water of countless
discussions on distutils-sig, debian-python and
two dozen of other popular mailing-lists, I'm not
so sure anymore.

>From what Alexander tells me and from the current
version of the python-2.5 patch it seems that we're
officially very happy with eggs.

A short executive summary about changes in python
import mechanism that prevent us from just ignoring
the whole egg-mania would be very much appreciated.

Thanks for all the effort going into the 2.5.x
upgrade!

Thanks!