pywin32 can't be installed with setuptools

[zooko]

​https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=551954&aid=1799934&group_id=78018

[zooko]

bumping this problem out to milestone 0.7.0

[zooko]

We need to choose a manageable subset of desired improvements for ​v0.7.1, scheduled for two week hence, so I'm bumping this one into ​v0.7.2, scheduled for mid-December.

[zooko]

Hooray! Philip J. Eby found a bug in setuptools that was causing this problem:

​http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2008-March/008867.html

[zooko]

setuptools 0.6c8 doesn't have the patch that makes it able to handle pywin32, but the current unreleased SVN of setuptools has.

[zooko]

Here is the ticket on the setuptools issue tracker:

​http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue18

[zooko]

This has been fixed, but pywin32 isn't hosted on pypi so it isn't automatically downloaded by easy_install. However, we can host our own copies, e.g. ​http://testgrid.allmydata.org:3567/uri/URI%3ADIR2-RO%3Asnrfwfxatrci35zdgjnzxxx2ke%3Aunarxv347edtku3xzmefy4mcdmfngxzeb72iyqcadbjzjpczjx5a/

The ticket asking the pywin32 folks to post packages (or links) on pypi is ​https://sourceforge.net/tracker2/?func=detail&aid=1799934&group_id=78018&atid=551954

Closing this ticket.

[zooko]

Whoops, I don't think pywin32 and the latest setuptools/zetuptoolz work after all.

[zooko]

See also ticket #756 (if pywin32 has been manually installed, setuptools still doesn't detect it).

[zooko]

Setuptools is being eclipsed by a vigorously developed fork of setuptools named "distribute". There is one ticket open in their issue tracker which mentions pywin32. Perhaps the maintainers of distribute would like to make sure that pywin32 is installable with their tool.

(Distribute is backwards-compatible with setuptools so we could switch over to distribute without too much difficulty.)

[zooko]

Okay, I found a helpful person on #distutils IRC channel who tried to easy_install pywin32 using distribute 0.6.10. The results are:

• ​http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/141/easy_install-pywin32-binary-succeeds-and-then-says-it-cant-find
• ​http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/140/compile-from-source-of-pywin32-failed

There is also an independent problem that the pywin32 files are not linked from pypi.python.org so setuptools will not find them to auto-download them unless we add an entry to find_links in setup.cfg. (Possibly that entry should be http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/files/ but I'm not sure if sourceforge's mirroring scheme will defeat setuptools's auto-downloading scheme.) Alternately we could host copies of the pywin32 packages on a Tahoe-LAFS grid and put the URL of that into find_links. :-) I'm pursuing ​http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute/issue/140/compile-from-source-of-pywin32-failed , which looks like it might be related to #756.

[zooko]

​http://www.mail-archive.com/python-win32@python.org/msg05269.html

I work for a company called Enthought who also ships a Python Distribution(EPD) which includes an 'egg' version of pywin32 that someone could easy_install. The entire distribution is free, but unfortunately there is an annual fee to access the egg repository for individual packages. However, I would be more than willing to help you get started with using setuptools and creating an egg for pywin32 :). Even if the pywin32 project doesn't upload the egg to PyPi, there is still another way through setuptools to make a single install step for your users.

[zooko]

See also #1093 (win32 build hell).

[davidsarah]

See also #1274 (eliminate pywin32 dependency).

[davidsarah]

No longer required.

[daira]

Reopening because of #2028 (Twisted endpoints introduce a dependency on pywin32).