[Distutils] setuptools --no-dependencies option needed?

[Rob Cakebread]

Hello,

I'm wondering if a --no-dependencies option would be useful. In Gentoo 
we edit every setup.py file that has install_requires, setup_requires, 
or extra_requires and remove that with sed or a patch because our 
package manager takes care of installing all dependencies and because 
users may already have packages installed previously without setuptools 
(in python 2.4).

We've found that can cause problems[1] and are considering using
  --single-version-externally-managed, but ideally we'd like to use the 
full features of setuptools (without losing the ability to install 
multiple versions, require-ing specific versions etc.).

Would an option similar to --single-version-externally-managed that 
simply doesn't check for installed dependencies and does not try to 
download and install any dependencies be possible?

Rob


[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=183977