According to the poll, The name of the fork will be Distribute !

The code should not be changed anymore at this point, and I am working on the bootstraping so installing Distribute will work with an existing Setuptools installation and will replace it for the applications that requires it.

This is done by detecting an installation of Setuptools, and replacing it with a fake installation. This means that once you’ve installed Distribute, applications and especially installers will think that setuptools 0.6c9 is installed.

That’s pretty strong and intrusive, but required for a simple switch : even if the programs you are using have a setuptools dependency, they will work without requiring any change on the code or in their setup.py files. Same goes for zc.buildout apps.

I still have a lot of work for this part :

I don’t detect and patch properly single-version-externally-managed setuptools installation yet (required for pip)

I need to fix a bug on a first run under jython

I need to fix a bug when virtualenv is not used with –no-site-packages

I need to do extensive tests on zc.buildout to see if it behaves correctly

If you want to help:

download http://nightly.ziade.org/install_test.py run it with the Python interpreter of your choice (possibly a virtualenv-ed one)

To uninstall, follow the Uninstallation instructions here : http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/src/tip/README.txt



*Disclaimer: it might break your installation*

If the test end up with this line: **** Test is OK. It worked. Otherwise, please let me know !

The next “big” step will happen with Distribute 0.7 because the plan is to split the code in several distributions with renamed modules:

Distribute : the core (setuptools package but renamed)

: the core (setuptools package but renamed) DistributeInstall : easy_install on its own, and renamed.

: easy_install on its own, and renamed. DistributeResource : will contain the pkg_resources.py module, renamed

I’ll post more details on it in the upcoming days.