[Distutils] Comments on PEP 426

[Carl Meyer]

On 09/04/2013 07:27 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> I was under the impression pip *already* forced the use of setuptools
> (to ensure "--record" is available)

Sidenote, and already mentioned by MAL upthread, but --record is a
distutils feature, not a setuptools feature, so this is not the reason
pip forces setuptools.

I think the actual reason is so that pip can have a uniform way to
access metadata (including dependency metadata that only setuptools has)
by running "setup.py egg-info", which is setuptools-only. (It also means
pip can install everything with the same installed format, including the
.egg-info metadata directory).

Carl