Comment by gvalkov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gvalkov | Hacker News Reader

I've wondered why using a dictionary to initialize setuptools.setup() isn't more advocated in such guides. I understand this is superficial, but imho, this looks much clearer than the author's suggestion [1]:

    from setuptools import setup

    kw = {
        'name'         : 'funniest',
        'version'      : '0.1',
        'description'  : 'The funniest joke in the world',
        'url'          : 'http://github.com/storborg/funniest',
        'author'       : 'Flying Circus',
        'author_email' : 'flyingcircus@example.com',
        'license'      : 'MIT',
        'packages'     : ['funniest'],
        'zip_safe'     : False,
    }

    if __name__ == '__main__':
        setup(**kw)

Here are a few of my setup.py files that follow this convention [2] [3] [4].

[1]: http://www.scotttorborg.com/python-packaging/minimal.html#cr...

[2]: https://github.com/gvalkov/harstats-graphite/blob/master/set...

[3]: https://github.com/gvalkov/jenkins-autojobs/blob/master/setu...

[4]: https://github.com/gvalkov/python-evdev/blob/master/setup.py

Adding spaces to make things line up is proscribed by the Python Style Guide. Which is entirely optional, but many people follow it.

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#pet-peeves

I'm so glad Go removes these sort of nitpicky style problems with gofmt. At first I was bothered by how gofmt makes things line up like this, but now I prefer no style guide and a tool that formats stuff for you.

Python has a tool (aptly named "pep8") which provides similar functionality. It doesn't make the changes for you, but it's very specific about what you need to fix to comply with the style guide.

Autopep8 makes the changes for you.

Because the only difference there is neater indentation, which you could do using the keywords method.

Additionally, there's no point checking that the script is the main file, as there's only ever one use-case for the script, and that's to call setuptools.

It actually comes in handy if you're using Sphinx and don't want to maintain release and version in conf.py separately from the version in setup.py. There's no reasons why the data should be consumable only by setuptools .

I put the version information inside the package, then anything with access to the package (which both setup.py and sphinx have) can access it - quite useful for doing things like checking the version number from the REPL, for instance.

It can be problematic to import your package from setup.py if you want your dependency specification to be useful.

You can use pkg_resources which comes with setuptools to look up the version number of your package in setup.py:

  import pkg_resources
  pkg_resources.get_distribution("PIL").version

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