Questions about Setuptools and alternatives

Question

I\'ve seen a good bit of setuptools bashing on the internets lately. Most recently, I read James Bennett\'s On packaging post on why no one should be using setuptools. From

Answer 1

For starters, pip is really new. New, incomplete and largely un-tested in the real world.

It shows great promise but until such time as it can do everything that easy_install/setuptools can do it's not likely to catch on in a big way, certainly not in the corporation.

Easy_install/setuptools is big and complex - and that offends a lot of people. Unfortunately there's a really good reason for that complexity which is that it caters for a huge number of different use-cases. My own is supporting a large ( > 300 ) pool of desktop users, plus a similar sized grid with a frequently updated application. The notion that we could do this by allowing every user to install from source is ludicrous - eggs have proved themselves a reliable way to distribute my project.

My advice: Learn to use setuptools - it's really a wonderful thing. Most of the people who hate it do not understand it, or simply do not have the use-case for as full-featured distribution system.

:-)