Only because it would be simpler if it did the same thing in both cases instead of doing different things. Why not?
I don't observe any misbehavior, but I haven't tried. I remember that py2exe used to have problems packaging Nevow because the version number that Nevow would generate during the packaging process would be determined by importing nevow, which would get a different version of nevow (from the sys.modules of the py2exe Python process) than the one that was being built and packaged. Inspecting this patch (but not trying it) I wonder if this code would have the same problem if used under py2exe in the absence of setuptools.
Only because it would be simpler if it did the same thing in both cases instead of doing different things. Why not?
I don't observe any misbehavior, but I haven't tried. I remember that py2exe used to have problems packaging Nevow because the version number that Nevow would generate during the packaging process would be determined by importing nevow, which would get a different version of nevow (from the sys.modules of the py2exe Python process) than the one that was being built and packaged. Inspecting this patch (but not trying it) I wonder if this code would have the same problem if used under py2exe in the absence of setuptools.