[Distutils] Parsing requirements, pip has no API ...

[Ian Cordasco]

pip is a command-line tool. The fact that you can import it doesn't
make it a library. If it documents no public API then it has none and
you shouldn't be relying on things that you can import from pip. You
can import requests from pip but you shouldn't do that either.

There seems to be a need for a separate library for this use case but
there isn't at the moment. In general, requirements.txt seems to be an
anti-pattern. You either have to use likely to break tooling or you'll
have to reinvent that from scratch. You're better off putting it
directly in setup.py and using setup.py to install dependencies in a
virtualenv instead of requirements.txt

On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 3:27 PM, Thomas Güttler
<guettliml at thomas-guettler.de> wrote:
> I was told:
>
> {{{
> Pip does not have a public API and because of that there is no backwards compatibility contract. It's impossible to fully parse every type of requirements.txt without a session so either parse_requirements needs to create one if it doesn't (which means if we forget to pass in a session somewhere it'll use the wrong one) or it needs one passed in.
> }}}
> From https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/2422#issuecomment-74271718
>
>
> Up to now we used parse_requirements() of pip, but in new versions you need to pass in a
> session.
>
> If I see changes like this:
>
> setup.py
> - install_requires=[str(req.req) for req in parse_requirements("requirements.txt")],
> + install_requires=[str(req.req) for req in parse_requirements("requirements.txt", session=uuid.uuid1())],
>
>  ... I think something is wrong.
>
>
> I am not an expert in python packaging details. I just want it to work.
>
> What is wrong here?
>
>   - You should not use parse_requirements() in setup.py
>   - pip should not change its API.
>   - you should not use pip at all, you should use ...?
>
> Regards,
>   Thomas
>
>
> --
> http://www.thomas-guettler.de/
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