[Distutils] depending on setuptools is discouraged?

[Nick Coghlan]

On 24 October 2014 07:07, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Matthias Klose wrote:
>>
>> Most packages need a dependency on pkg_resources only. So adding a
>> pkg-resources
>> egg would be nice.
>
> I thought that making pkg_resources a separate thing was one
> of the goals of the new distutils regime. Has it not happened
> yet?

My understanding is that setuptools currently faces its own
bootstrapping problems if pkg_resources is separated out. The accepted
PEP 477 will backport ensurepip to Python 2.7.9+, at which point
"python -m ensurepip && python -m pip install --upgrade setuptools"
should reliably cover the bootstrapping problem even with
pkg_resources separated out.

That said, there also isn't a current setuptools issue to split them,
so I don't know where this currently sits on Jason's priority list
(setuptools itself really isn't that big a deal as a runtime
dependency - the thing you don't want on your production servers is
the compilers that setuptools needs in order to do anything useful
with extension module source files).

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia