[Distutils] Limitations of setup_requires

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 06:20 PM 10/1/2006 -0700, Joshua Boverhof wrote:
>Yes it is since I'm "generating" code when I do
>"make_generated_packages".

Okay, then before you call setup() in your setup script, create an instance 
of setuptools.dist.Distribution() that has setup_requires set, but doesn't 
include any packages; and don't do anything besides create it.  Then, run 
your package generation, and finally run setup().  You do not need a custom 
Distribution subclass, as far as I can tell.

The only disadvantage to doing it this way is that if somebody does 
"setup.py --help", your package is still going to do dependency downloads 
and code generation.  But then, that also happens the way you're doing it now.