On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 11:21 AM, Tres Seaver <tsea...@palladion.com> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 03/26/2013 05:28 AM, Ronald Oussoren wrote: >> >> On 25 Mar, 2013, at 19:16, PJ Eby <p...@telecommunity.com> wrote: >>> >>> >>> Also, as far as detecting the need for setuptools, I think that can >>> be done just by noticing whether the PKG-INFO included in an sdist >>> is metadata 2.0 or not. If it is, then setuptools should be >>> explicitly declared as a build-time dependency, otherwise it's not >>> needed. If it's an older metadata version, then you probably need >>> setuptools. >> >> Is it even necessary to automaticly install setuptools? >> Setuptools-using package are supposed to use ez_setup.py, or >> distribute_setup.py for distribute, to ensure that the setuptools >> package is available during setup. > > No, they are not. That usage was for bootstrapping in an era when > setuptools was not widely presetn. Most packages have *removed* those > files today.
I still use distribute_setup.py very regularly. I'm dealing with scientific users, mostly on Macs or Windows who barely even know what version of Python they have installed (or even what distribution of Python--python.org/macports/homebrew/etc.) much less that they need some variant of setuptools to install a large percentage of packages out there. Sometimes they do have setuptools installed but it's an outdated version, or they didn't install it properly, or something to that effect. I don't think "downloading the installer" should be a side effect of running the installation either, but until this mess is cleaned up it's a necessary evil. Yes, making things easier for users who don't know what they're doing is a legitimate use case. Erik _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig