Upgrade to Setuptools.

[seanfisk]

Distribute and Setuptools have merged into Setuptools, so it looks like Setuptools is the future. We should upgrade.

[bitmensch]

@seanfisk Could you give a short high-level overview about the impacts of this change. What would need to be changed to upgrade to setuptools?

Doing a simple grep for the word distribute does not show up any dependencies to me, only some comments and link to Distribute.

Is Distribute currently really a requirement we have? Did I miss something?

[seanfisk]

The confusing thing about Distribute is that it masquerades under the package name setuptools. Distribute was created as an updated (and maintained) version of Setuptools as was envisioned to function as a drop-in replacement, hence the identical package name. People have moved on to using Distribute by default (e.g., virtualenv), so Setuptools was kind of forgotten. I'm not sure if the merge reduces confusion or adds more of it.

We do have somewhat hard dependencies on Distribute. In setup.py.tpl:4, this import actually refers to Distribute. In addition, the last three keywords of setup_dict are Distribute-specific. Specifically, we use Distribute for the following:

• Finding all declared packages (i.e., find_packages())
• Automatic installation of required packages (distutils doesn't do this AFAIK)
• Automatic Script Creation, which creates launchers for distributed executables. Without Distribute, this is particularly painful on Windows.

I am hoping that "upgrading" to Setuptools will only require a few minor documentation changes, with some possible small code changes. Does that answer your question?

[bitmensch]

@seanfisk Yes, this answers my question. Thanks for clarifying.

[seanfisk]

Finished.