zope.interface depends on setuptools but appears to think that it doesn't

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

The beginning of zope.interface 3.4.0 setup.py catches ImportError if setuptools can't be imported and attempts to fall back to distutils. However, it then immediately attempts to execute find_packages(). This means that (a) it fails if setuptools is not installed, but (b) it is hard for a user or an automated tool to tell that the problem is that setuptools is missing.

To fix this bug, why not use the ez_setup.py hack?

http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

Or if you don't like that hack, then at least just don't catch the ImportError so that it is easy to tell what's missing.

(For the record, I have an automated tool that I wrote which probes setup.py files to figure out whether they are packaged with distutils or with setuptools. zope.interface 3.4.0 is the only setup.py file that I've encountered which causes my tool to fail.)

Here's the bug report for my zope.interface-using project:

http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/140

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (zooko)]

This changelog entry suggests that perhaps this bug was fixed in zope.interface 3.4.1:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zope.interface#id1

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (zooko)]

Yep, looks like the buggy code is gone:

http://svn.zope.org/zope.interface/trunk/setup.py?rev=78166&view=markup

So how do we close this ticket on launchpad?