setuptools on Jython

A couple weeks ago setuptools added support for Jython trunk. This was made possible with a number of additions and fixes to Jython for setuptools, including distutils and file descriptor support.

A working setuptools is the first big step in getting Pylons working on Jython. Django on Jython has had some recent success; luckily for them Django doesn't rely on/use setuptools at all. So Leo Soto, Jim Baker and the rest of the Django on Jython folks were able to skip directly to kicking around the Django code on Jython.

Now that we have setuptools, the next step is to go through each of Pylons dependencies and ensure their tests pass. Pylons as well as some of its dependencies use the nose test runner. Nose is almost fully working on Jython (after I submit a few upstream patches to nose).

Other dependencies (such as Paste and Beaker) use py.test for their test runners, but there's been some talk of moving some of these over to nose -- which would actually be a good thing right now for Jython. Though technically nose could run through these projects' tests as they already are, they rely on some py.test functionality, such as py.test.raises.

Not to bad mouth py.test -- it has some nice features, like distributed testing -- but I attempted get it working on Jython during the TurboGears 2 sprint a few weeks ago and it wasn't a small task. Part of the problem is the fact that py.test is part of the larger py package. py isn't just a test runner, it also includes other packages that are intertwined with test portion -- all of which need to work before you're able to use just py.test.