In 2013, the fork of Distribute was merged back into Setuptools. This document describes some of the details of the merge.
In order to try to accurately reflect the fork and then re-merge of the projects, the merge process brought both code trees together into one repository and grafted the Distribute fork onto the Setuptools development line (as if it had been created as a branch in the first place).
The rebase to get distribute onto setuptools went something like this:
hg phase -d -f -r 26b4c29b62db
hg rebase -s 26b4c29b62db -d 7a5cf59c78d7
The technique required a late version of mercurial (2.5) to work correctly.
The only code that was included was the code that was ancestral to the public releases of Distribute 0.6. Additionally, because Setuptools was not hosted on Mercurial at the time of the fork and because the Distribute fork did not include a complete conversion of the Setuptools history, the Distribute changesets had to be re-applied to a new, different conversion of the Setuptools SVN repository. As a result, all of the hashes have changed.
Distribute was grafted in a ‘distribute’ branch and the ‘setuptools-0.6’ branch was targeted for the merge. The ‘setuptools’ branch remains with unreleased code and may be incorporated in the future.
There were both technical and philosophical differences between Setuptools and Distribute. To reconcile these differences in a manageable way, the following technique was undertaken:
Create a ‘Setuptools-Distribute merge’ branch, based on a late release of Distribute (0.6.35). This was done with a00b441856c4.
In that branch, first remove code that is no longer relevant to Setuptools (such as the setuptools patching code).
Next, in the the merge branch, create another base from at the point where the fork occurred (such that the code is still essentially an older but pristine setuptools). This base can be found as 955792b069d0. This creates two heads in the merge branch, each with a basis in the fork.
Then, repeatedly copy changes for a single file or small group of files from a late revision of that file in the ‘setuptools-0.6’ branch (1aae1efe5733 was used) and commit those changes on the setuptools-only head. That head is then merged with the head with Distribute changes. It is in this Mercurial merge operation that the fundamental differences between Distribute and Setuptools are reconciled, but since only a single file or small set of files are used, the scope is limited.
Finally, once all the challenging files have been reconciled and merged, the remaining changes from the setuptools-0.6 branch are merged, deferring to the reconciled changes (a1fa855a5a62 and 160ccaa46be0).
Originally, jaraco attempted all of this using anonymous heads in the Distribute branch, but later realized this technique made for a somewhat unclear merge process, so the changes were re-committed as described above for clarity. In this way, the “distribute” and “setuptools” branches can continue to track the official Distribute changesets.
With the merge of Setuptools and Distribute, the following concessions were made:
Differences from setuptools 0.6c12:
Differences from Distribute 0.6.36: