[Yt-dev] distribute and setuptools

[Matthew Turk]

Hi guys,

Over the last little while, there has been a conscious motion of the
Python community away from "setuptools" to "distribute."  The upshot
of this is that distribute is maintained by a larger body of people
and is much more active.  Additionally, many of the bugs of setuptools
have been fixed.  ( The homepage is here:
http://packages.python.org/distribute/index.html )

Setuptools provides a couple things: mainly, and most visibly, it's
the source of 'easy_install' and 'ez_setup.py', both of which are
installed by yt and by the yt install script.  I've committed a change
to trunk that will, instead, install the distribute packages.  This
should be a drop in replacement and re-running the install script
should update everything correctly.  easy_install will still be
provided, but from distribute instead of setuptools.  Additionally,
I've added 'pip', which is a newer piece of software that does the
same thing 'easy_install' does.  "pip install" is more reliable and
less opaque than "easy_install."

Anyway, I wanted to give you all a heads up.  If you run into problems
with anything following this change, please let me know!

With distribute, I'm going to be adding an "instinfo" command to the
"yt" script, which will hopefully help with getting information about
the current installation and so on.  This should alleviate some of the
problems of figuring out where things are installed, etc etc, and
maybe even add an auto-update command.

-Matt