On 19 Mar 2015 23:33, "Leonardo Rochael Almeida" <leorochael@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 18 March 2015 at 14:37, Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:
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>> [...]
>>
>> The behavior we're aiming for would be:
>>
>> "installer run setup.py" - installs things
>> "python setup.py" - does not install things
>
>
> Besides that, I'd add that we're also looking for: "python setup.py" (by itself) should not raise ImportError, even if setup.py needs extra things installed for certain operations (egg_info, build, sdist, develop, install).
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> IMO, the biggest pain point is not people putting crazy stuff in setup.py to get version numbers. For me, the biggest pain point is when setup.py needs to import other packages in order to even know how to build:
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> So I'd like to suggest the following series of small improvements to both pip and setuptools:
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>  * setuptools: `python setup.py setup_requires` dumps its setup_requires keyword in 'requirements.txt' format

I believe setuptools can already do this (as "setup-requirements.txt"), but it's a generated file that people tend not to check into source control.

Saying that file *should* be checked into source control (and teaching pip about it when looking for dependencies) might be a reasonable improvement - CPython certainly checks in several generated files to reduce the number of tools needed to build CPython in the typical case.

Cheers,
Nick.