On Mar 26, 2013 5:28 AM, "Ronald Oussoren" <ronaldoussoren@mac.com> wrote:
On 25 Mar, 2013, at 19:16, PJ Eby <pje@telecommunity.com> wrote:
Also, as far as detecting the need for setuptools, I think that can be done just by noticing whether the PKG-INFO included in an sdist is metadata 2.0 or not. If it is, then setuptools should be explicitly declared as a build-time dependency, otherwise it's not needed. If it's an older metadata version, then you probably need setuptools.
Is it even necessary to automaticly install setuptools? Setuptools-using
package are supposed to use ez_setup.py, or distribute_setup.py for distribute, to ensure that the setuptools package is available during setup. Although I must admit that I have no idea how many packages still do this instead of assuming that users will have installed setuptools anyway.
Ronald
We really really really want to get rid of ez_setup. It is considered by many to be the example of something that should not happen as a side effect of running a build script. When packages no longer have to install themselves, they can just mention setup-requires and the installer grabs the necessary setuptools.