What is Distribute in Python?

The Distribute is a package that was used to build and distribute Python packages. It was developed as a fork of the setuptools package and provided many of the same features, with the goal of improving and extending the functionality of setuptools.

However, Distribute was eventually merged back into the setuptools project, and is no longer maintained as a separate package. If you come across a reference to Distribute, it is most likely an outdated reference that should be replaced with setuptools.

setuptools is now the recommended way to build and distribute Python packages. It is a package in the Python standard library that provides tools for building and distributing Python packages, and it includes support for many features that are not available in the distutils module.

Example

This setup.py file specifies the name and version of your package, as well as the name of the package directory where your package’s modules are stored. You can then use setuptools to build and distribute your package in the same way as with distutils, using the build, install, and sdist commands.

Overall, distutils is the original package management system for Python, and it is included in the standard library. setuptools is a third-party package that builds on top of distutils and provides additional features and functionality. distribute was a fork of setuptools that has since been merged back into setuptools, and distutils2 was a fork of distutils that was abandoned in favor of the packaging and packaging-setuptools-py2 projects.

There are several differences between distribute, distutils, and setuptools in Python.

• distribute is a fork of setuptools that was created to address some of the shortcomings of setuptools and to provide more features and better support for non-Python platforms. distribute was merged back into setuptools in 2013 and is no longer maintained as a separate project.
• distutils is the original package management system for Python, and it is included in the standard library. distutils provides basic functionality for packaging and distributing Python modules, but it does not provide many of the features and enhancements that are available in setuptools.
• setuptools is a third-party package that builds on top of distutils and provides additional features and functionality for packaging and distributing Python modules. setuptools is widely used in the Python community and is considered to be the de facto standard for packaging and distributing Python modules.