* Dev Requirements It would be nice to have a dev-requirements.txt file so that they could easily install the necessary development tools. pydoctor, coverage, nevow, zope.interface, twistedchecker, etc See: * https://github.com/hynek/structlog/blob/master/dev-requirements.txt
What tools actually make use of this file?
pip install -r dev-requirements.txt
Why is it desirable to keep this information there, instead of the 'requirements' key in setup.py?
There is no ‘requirements’ key – and ‘requires’ are runtime dependencies. You don’t want to put your development tools there.
(Is there a 'develop_requires' key?)
No: http://pythonhosted.org/distribute/setuptools.html#new-and-changed-setup-key... There is tests_require which is also something different from development tools and get used when you run setup.py test which we AFAIK don’t.