The more I use setuptools the more I love it! The next version of filament
is going to pretty much require setuptools (though I might do a custom monolithic distutils download). The features that really won me over are namespace packages, and develop mode.
Namespace packages let you release modules as multiple eggs, but every python
module inside the egg belongs to a _single_ top level module name. In the
future I plan on having a core filament module developed in one source tree
and others in separate trees. For example, I can work on filament.skins in
a separate tree from the core of filament, but all python sees is a
single parent module with skins within it.
Develop mode is also really cool, I used to manage everything with a thousand
symlinks and it was a pain to work with both releases and development trees
at the same time. Setuptools gives the setup.py script a new command 'develop'
which creates a link (not-symlink) to the development source tree. It's
versioned and everything, so it becomes really easy to switch back and forth.
For me this means no more futzing around with sys.path to get
my symlinks and eggs in the right order.
My only complaint is that it made me change the way I was writing
my version numbers. I have to do x.x.devel instead of x.x-devel. But that
is pretty minor for the smart version aware management that setuptools
gives.
