— 5 min read

Over the last week I’ve been doing a huge amount of refactoring of Blackhole as well as writing dozens of additional tests. To make Blackhole more testable I needed to make a big change to how the program is launched and controlled.

setup.py scripts vs. entry_points

Whenever I’ve written Python programs that require some kind of command line script I’ve always used distutils’ scripts, this can be seen in blackhole’s setup.py on GitHub or in the three line example below.

scripts=[
    'blackhole/bin/blackhole',
],

In doing so, it allowed me to be lazy and write a lot of prodecural code in the main “binary” which made it pretty much impossible to test. You can also see that on GitHub in the main “binary”.

I’ve noticed that most people who write Python packages that have some kind of command line entry point use distutils …