From the beginning, it was clear that one of the major hurdle for bento would be transition from distutils. This is a hard issue for any tool trying to improve existing ones, but even more so for distribution/packaging tools, as it impacts everyone (developers and users of the tools).

Since almost day one, bento had some basic facilities to convert existing distutils projects into bento.info. I have now added something to do the exact contrary, that is maintaing some distutils extensions which are driven by bento.info. Concretely, it means that if you have a bento package, you can write something like:

import setuptools # this comes first so that setuptools does its monkey dance import bento.distutils # this monkey patches on top of setuptools setuptools.setup()

as your setup.py, it will give the “illusion” of a distutils package. Of course, it won’t give you all the goodies given by bento (if it could, I would not have written bento in the first place), but it is good enough to enable the following:

installing through the usual “python setup.py install”

building source distributions

more significantly: it will make your package easy_install-able/pip-able

This feature will be in bento 0.0.5, which will be released very soon (before pycon 2011 where I will present bento). More details may be found on bento’s documentation