{"id":23551,"library":"distribute","title":"distribute (legacy wrapper)","description":"A legacy compatibility shim for distribute (the former fork of setuptools). It provides backported features and exists primarily for projects that have not migrated to setuptools. Current version 0.7.3 is very old; the package is effectively abandoned. New projects should use setuptools directly.","status":"deprecated","version":"0.7.3","language":"python","source_language":"en","source_url":"https://bitbucket.org/tarek/distribute","tags":["legacy","setuptools","deprecated"],"install":[{"cmd":"pip install distribute","lang":"bash","label":"Official PyPI package"}],"dependencies":[],"imports":[{"note":"distribute is a wrapper; the actual namespace is setuptools. Direct import of distribute is unnecessary.","wrong":"import distribute","symbol":"setuptools","correct":"from setuptools import setup"}],"quickstart":{"code":"from setuptools import setup, find_packages\n\nsetup(\n    name='example',\n    version='0.1',\n    packages=find_packages(),\n)","lang":"python","description":"Use setuptools directly. The distribute package is not needed."},"warnings":[{"fix":"Replace 'distribute' dependency with 'setuptools'.","message":"distribute is considered legacy and is no longer maintained. It has been merged back into setuptools.","severity":"deprecated","affected_versions":">=0.7"},{"fix":"Use from setuptools import ... instead of import distribute.","message":"Importing 'distribute' does not provide a separate namespace; it re-exports setuptools. Users often mistakenly think distribute provides its own API.","severity":"gotcha","affected_versions":"all"}],"env_vars":null,"last_verified":"2026-05-01T00:00:00.000Z","next_check":"2026-07-30T00:00:00.000Z","problems":[{"fix":"Install setuptools and use 'from setuptools import setup'.","cause":"The 'distribute' package is not installed, but the code tries to import it directly.","error":"ImportError: No module named distribute"},{"fix":"Use 'from setuptools import setup' and call 'setup()' directly.","cause":"The user imported distribute and tried to call distribute.setup().","error":"AttributeError: module 'distribute' has no attribute 'setup'"}],"ecosystem":"pypi","meta_description":null,"install_score":null,"install_tag":null,"quickstart_score":null,"quickstart_tag":null}