GHC 2016-12-30

2016-12-30 19:51:50, https://git.io/vML1l in jarun/googler
> setuptools is the current Python-wide standard for building and installing Python software overall

Thanks for the intro, but I am a Python programmer and am intimately familiar with setuptools. Let me briefly (actually not so briefly, after I finished writing) state my opinions against it for current and future observers:

1. googler is a standalone script with zero dependency other than Python 3.3+, and I don't see that changing any time soon. As long as you have `/usr/bin/env` and a compliant `python3` in your path you can run it, from anywhere. There's nothing that setuptools can help with other than install or link the script somewhere.

2. We have a Makefile. Is `./setup.py install` easier than `make install`? No.

3. setuptools deals with packages. We'll need to have the structure of a package to use the default setup mechanism, something we won't do because there's no benefit. Alternatively, we can write custom code in `setup.py` (instead of just making a few preps and calling `setuptools.setup`) to do our own thing — basically make it a Makefile, but what's the damn point?

4. setuptools doesn't handle man pages out of box, even if we opt into a package structure.

5. If we opted into the package structure (again, won't happen), setuptools would install googler as an entry point, a debugging nightmare for people not familiar with setuptools. I mean, what the heck is

    ```py
    #!/Users/zmwang/.pyenv/virtualenvs/tmp-e5fd4ae83b9f92b/bin/python3
    # EASY-INSTALL-ENTRY-SCRIPT: 'googler==2.9','console_scripts','googler'
    __requires__ = 'googler==2.9'
    import re
    import sys
    from pkg_resources import load_entry_point
    
    if __name__ == '__main__':
        sys.argv[0] = re.sub(r'(-script\.pyw?|\.exe)?$', '', sys.argv[0])
        sys.exit(
            load_entry_point('googler==2.9', 'console_scripts', 'googler')()
        )
    ```
    
    ???

6. We have packages for Debian/Ubuntu and macOS Homebrew, those cover a huge swath of the potential user base. If someone bothers to submit googler to an rpm-based distro, e.g. Fedora/CentOS/OpenSUSE we'll be even better.

    For the rest of the people out there, I went out of my way to make it easy to install and upgrade as a single script: https://github.com/jarun/googler#downloading-a-single-file.

    Any of these options is simpler and more robust than plain setuptools which (1) requires cloning the repo / downloading a tarball and (2) doesn't handle upgrades. (The premise here is we're not going to submit to PyPI.)

>  special-snowflake packages that doesn't use it often cause some friction, and it's generally more of a hassle overall to not use it.

Generalization like this (basically FUD) doesn't contribute to the discussion. If you find specific hassles (other than "I don't want to read the f*king README"), please let us know.