[Distutils] depending on setuptools is discouraged?

[Donald Stufft]

> 
> On Oct 23, 2014, at 4:47 PM, Matthias Klose <doko at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 
> Am 23.10.2014 um 22:38 schrieb Donald Stufft:
>> 
>>> On Oct 23, 2014, at 4:23 PM, Michael Merickel <me at m.merickel.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I'm noticing a trend that depending on setuptools is discouraged[1] in
>>> the install_requires of your setup.py. However, some packages like
>>> pyramid have core features that depend on pkg_resources (which is part
>>> of setuptools). Thus, we depend on it. As I've monitored distutils-sig
>>> I haven't seen any talk of separating these packages. To me, requiring
>>> the use of pkg_resources is a very valid use-case for depending on
>>> setuptools as it provides many improvements over the basic
>>> `pkgutil.get_data` API.
>>> 
>>> Since I'm not aware of a workaround for this problem, and I'm seeing
>>> setuptools be categorically discouraged, perhaps I am just unaware and
>>> need to be enlightened?
>>> 
>>> Thanks!
>>> 
>>> [1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2014-October/025131.html
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>> 
>> To be specific that post was talking about using the idiom that will
>> automatically bootstrap setuptools when you run setup.py::
>> 
>>    from distribute_setup import use_setuptools
>>    use_setuptools(version="0.6.49”)
>> 
>> Projects *should* depend on setuptools in install_requires if their
>> project itself uses something inside of setuptools as a runtime
>> dependency (e.g. not in setup.py).
> 
> I don't know about many packages needing setuptools as a runtime dependency.
> Most packages need a dependency on pkg_resources only. So adding a pkg-resources
> egg would be nice.

As oh right now pkg_resources is part of setuptools, it’s only the downstream
folks who split them apart. There are some decisions to make regarding splitting
them out that I don’t know how setuptools wants to handle it.

However once the stuff that pkg_resources provides is standardized it will be
available as part of https://warehouse.python.org/project/packaging/ so projects
wishing to use the standards based functionality (most of which is heavily inspired
if not outright “stolen” from setuptools/pkg_resources) will be able to use that
eventually.

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Donald Stufft
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