[Distutils] Comments on PEP 426

[Paul Moore]

On 4 September 2013 12:05, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
> Also would this be sufficient to decouple pip and setuptools (a
> reasonable goal in itself)? Or does pip depend on setuptools in more
> ways than the distutils monkey-patching?

I've not got round to reviewing the code (it's on my list) but I think
it would be sufficient. There is a fair amount of internal pip use of
*pkg_resources* (for versions, requirements parsing, and such like)
but that's a somewhat different matter - it would be trivial to
extract and vendor pkg_resources if we so wished.

We may still need the "inject setuptools" hack in certain cases,
simply because pure-distutils packages simply don't provide that
interface out of the box. And that may be a major issue because
there's no obvious way to detect when a project needs that hack
without the project saying so, or us making an assumption. But it's
much less of a technical issue at that point.

Paul