[Distutils] fix setup_requires by allowing it in setup.cfg or a setup_requires.txt

[Donald Stufft]

On May 15, 2014, at 1:55 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is not a hole.
> 
> Historically there has been VERY STRONG resistance to any practical,
> incremental improvements to packaging. Instead we are expected to come
> up with something that is ideal and fully formed. The results is that
> packaging is not often improved.
> 
> The proposal is just a way to make setup.py work a little better. We
> are going to have setup.py forever, but we hope it will not be the
> primary way to make new packages. We are going to have lists of
> requirements forever. We are going to need setup & build requirements
> specifications that actually work. Allowing a list of requirements in
> setup.cfg or a text file is a very simple way to move in the right
> direction.

I'm completely for incremental improvements *which move us closer towards the
final end goal*. Hacking in this support is not that.

It'll only reasonably work in pip 1.6+ and won't in older versions of pip nor
easy_install, zc.buildout, or direct setup.py invocations. This represents an
official recommended backwards compatibility break. It is much better to be
able to work on either new formats or improvements to the existing formats
which don't require changing the fundamental API contract of the old formats.

Hacking it in by the project creating a fake setup.py that does the work is
a much better solution since it doesn't break the API contracts and it doesn't
represent another pseudo format that we'll have to support indefinitely.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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