While building pyvcs and django-vcs over 4th of July weekend with Alex Gaynor [fn:0] , there were a few interesting lessons learned, mostly revolving around how setuptools works. As Jacob mentions in his [[http://jacobian.org/writing/django-apps-with-buildout/][post on buildout]] , you mostly have to cobble together the usage of setuptools from other setups. This works well at about 90% of the case. There are a few gotchas, however.

  1. find_packages(‘directory’) will look under directory for a list of python modules to install. For our applications, we actually just wanted find_packages()
  2. You can’t easily specify multiple authors for a project. We settled on author = “First Author, Second Author”
  3. Its a good idea to version target your requirements. Don’t require “pyvcs”, require “pyvcs>=0.1”.
  4. If your project contains django templates, set the zip_safe property to False.
  5. The register or sdist upload setup.py commands actually check that your project installs. For that, its likely better to use a virtualenv and test the installation.
  6. package_data is used to includes docs (or in our case, templates) with the project.

[fn:0] You can find the announcement here.