I've seen a good bit of setuptools bashing on the internets lately. Most recently, I read James Bennett's On packaging post on why no one should be using setuptools. From my time in #python on Freenode, I know that there are a few souls there who absolutely detest it. I would count myself among them, but I do actually use it.
I've used setuptools for enough projects to be aware of its deficiencies, and I would prefer something better. I don't particularly like the egg format and how it's deployed. With all of setuptools' problems, I haven't found a better alternative.
My understanding of tools like pip is that it's meant to be an easy_install replacement (not setuptools). In fact, pip uses some setuptools components, right?
Most of my packages make use of a setuptools-aware setup.py, which declares all of the dependencies. When they're ready, I'll build an sdist, bdist, and bdist_egg, and upload them to pypi.
If I wanted to switch to using pip, what kind of changes would I need to make to rid myself of easy_install dependencies? Where are the dependencies declared? I'm guessing that I would need to get away from using the egg format, and provide just source distributions. If so, how do i generate the egg-info directories? or do I even need to?
How would this change my usage of virtualenv? Doesn't virtualenv use easy_install to manage the environments?
How would this change my usage of the setuptools provided "develop" command? Should I not use that? What's the alternative?
I'm basically trying to get a picture of what my development workflow will look like.
Before anyone suggests it, I'm not looking for an OS-dependent solution. I'm mainly concerned with debian linux, but deb packages are not an option, for the reasons Ian Bicking outlines here.