Re: [Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

virtualenv /tmp/builder /tmp/builder/bin/pip wheel -w /tmp/wheels -r requirements.txt

people will expect to be able to do this globally (i.e not in a virtualenv). that's when the headache starts It does not try to avoid the non-problem of installing setuptools when you

actually need it

it's a practical problem for users, due to being currently responsible for fulfilling the setuptools dependency themselves in non-virtualenv environments IMO, we need to bundle or install it for them (through dynamic installs, or add the logic to get-pip)