[Distutils] why would you ever need to specify setuptools as a dependency?

[Hanno Schlichting]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Chris Withers <chris at simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
> Reinout van Rees wrote:
>>
>> - Do my libraries have to list a dependency on distribute or on
>> setuptools?
>>  Everything zopish has a 'setuptools >= 0.6c9' in it.
>
> They shouldn't, unless you only require setuptools after your package is
> installed and don't use it in your setup.py, which seems unlikely.
>
> If you need it in your setup.py, what's the point of specifying it? You
> would have had to use it by the time you specify the requirement!

I assume most packages Reinout uses (like all zope.* packages) use
namespace packages. So they actually do depend during runtime on the
pkg_resources module, which happens to be available from either the
distribute  or setuptools distribution. So one of them should be
specified in install_requires.

Hanno