Enable distutils for a django reusable app

As you might already be aware Pinax move to distutils, this change has been described by James Tauber in this post. Today I have decided to make my feet wet with this approach for a django reusable app. I have been guided by jezdez on #pinax.
Before starting I would recommend you to read this page, yes I know, it is a bit long but very interesting. after this reading you will be well prepared to start to work on you django reusable app.

I have used one of my project django-geotagging to experiment with this approach. The project can be found on launchpad there. The good news about this approach is that all the major rcs are supported : SVN, BZR, HG, ... If your favorite versionning system is missing there is a good chance that I just forget to mention it. This list is not exhaustive.

The core of this approach is a file called setup.py that need to be paced at the root of your repository, most of its argument are self explanatory.

This file enable you to setup a complete env in 4 steps :

• Create a virtual env : virtualenv geotagging_env
• Move into that env : cd geotagging_env
• Activate the env : . bin/activate
• Install pip : easy_install pip
• Use pip to grab django-geotagging : pip install -e bzr+http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~yml/django-geotagging/geotags/#egg=django-geotags

The coolness of this increase with the number of reusable apps you have to install in order to build your web project.

I would be glad to learn from you what kind of cool things can be done once this infrastructure is in place.