distribute_setup should be destroyed with fire

Do we still need to support distribute installation as a side-effect of setup.py invocation?

http://pythonhosted.org/distribute/using.html

I'm not sure - I suspect we do. I know some package maintainers still use this to enable their packages to be installed by distutils even when they depend on setuptools. I believe this behavior will remain in setuptools as well as distribute and that the fix will ultimately be to use the new pip and its bootstrap technique.

We can revisit this issue if/when setuptools and distribute are merged. For distribute proper, however, this bootstrap technique will remain.

Do we still need to support distribute installation as a side-effect of setup.py invocation?

Sorry I don't like it either, but yes. Yes we do.

We could remove it from the docs though, so nobody that isn't already doing this starts doing it.