Re: [Python-markdown-discuss] [Plone-Users] ZopeSkel version pinning invalid

[Waylan L. <wa...@gm...>]

First, sorry for not responding directly to this message. As I've
stated elsewhere, my connectivity has been very limited these past few
weeks and probably will be for the next couple months. My normal dev
box for this stuff is currently disassembled and in storage - making
proper testing in all supported versions less than ideal. Like many
open source projects, I do this in my spare time and sometimes life
gets in the way.

Second, I will add that while setuptools certainly has it's merits, I
personally do not care for it and would prefer to not use it at all.
For more specifics from someone smarter than me, I would suggest
reading Ian Bicking's thoughts (among others) on setuptools (the
creator of pip and virtualenv). Of course, at the same time I realize
that others actually use easy_install regularly (including markdown
users) so I make sure it works.

However, that's about as far as I prefer to go. I saw your patch
switched to using setuptools and I stopped reading. I could suggest
that if someone provides a patch that allows use of various extended
features of setuptools we would use it, but the fact is, I don't want
to maintain it.

Anyway, enough about me...

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 5:41 AM, kiorky <ki...@cr...> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> The problem is fixed although the solution used is far for optimal and even
> dirty for me:
>
>        * Duplication around current version, my pkg_resources call in the proposed
> patch was not there to make things nicer,

I'm not crazy about the version number being defined in two places
either. However, the fact is, that is how it was for some time - even
before I joined the project. I more recently fixed that, but the
dependency on ElemenTree was added even later. In fact, this is the
first time this project has had any third party dependencies - so
we're still ironing out a few things. I suppose it doesn't help that
non of the core devs use older python versions that don't have
ElementTree in the standard lib. We just test on an install of those
versions which already have the dependency installed.

> Think that if you want to use that,
> you can't import the module with version bites in the setup.py because at
> install time, your distribution will not be already registered with the
> setuptools machinery and you will get some DistributionNotFoundError unless you
> had a previous markdown installation (silent error).
>
>        * False commit messages
>                """
>                Fixed a silly bug in setup.py. Importing version from the lib
>                requires that all dependencaies for the lib are present, so we
>                can't actuly import the lib until after we check for
>                dependencies - which means we can't import version in the setup
>                script. Grrr. We'll have to remember to update the version
>                number in both places from now on. Sigh.
>                """
>        It's not true [1]. The real problem, i think was an ImportError  at install
> time (ElementTree?) resulting on an unavailability of the module. That was one
> of the purposes of my provided patch also...

Exactly, the ImportError was from tying to import ElementTree, which
failed because it was not installed yet. Obviously, the setup script
can't import a module before it installs it - which was what my commit
message was trying to convey in a roundabout sort of way.

If someone can provide a better patch that doesn't use setuptools,
I'll happily commit it.

Oh, and my comment regarding the "silly error" was in regard to
myself. It was silly of me to not recognize the potential for that
error to occur.

>        * Another error is to mixing setuptools and distutils, AFAIK, install_requires
> is on setuptools side.

Not true. As part of a previous bug report, someone provided a patch
that used install_requires and that was my initial thought. But then I
checked the distutils docs and there is was, albeit, not documented
very well.

I should also point out that our documentation recommends that anyone
on <2.5 run `easy_install elementtree` before `easy_install markdown`.
That seems "good enough" for me. However, I realize that that may not
be ideal for mass deployments across numerous systems using some
automated mechanism - which is more likely the situation were people
are stuck using those aging python versions.

As as aside Ian Bicking's pip offers a much nicer solution to this problem IMO.

> That may be why Waylan did not spoil me this new release.
>

Sorry, I don't follow your point with the rest of your message. It
appears to be an attempt to impress me with the magic of setuptools.
But that's the thing, too much magic isn't always better. Again, see
pip for a less magical approach. If I misunderstood your intent,
apologize.

Regardless, we appreciate your feedback.

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Waylan Limberg