[Distutils] Role of setuptools and eggs in "modern" distributing...

[Paul Moore]

On 8 January 2015 at 00:20, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> When I call "setup.py develop", setuptools apparently looks for the
> "install_requires" packages. If it doesn't find them, it goes out and
> decided to apparently pip install them: gets the source form pypi, download,
> tries to compile, etc....

Do you get any better results if you use "pip install -e ."? I'm not
sure you will, but it might mean that pip does the dependency
management for you rather than setuptools, and as long as conda
records dependency information in a way that pip recognises that might
help.

> Even if it does find them already installed, it does some annoying adding to
> easy_install.pth magic for them.

Unfortunately, that's just the way develop mode (pip's editable mode) works.

It sounds to me that this is more of a conda issue - it doesn't seem
to be creating standard distribution metadata to allow pip/setuptools
to recognise what it has installed, and it doesn't provide its own
equivalent of editable/develop mode (which would allow you to work
purely within the conda framework and avoid these issues).

Have you tried asking the conda folks about these issues? I thought
that when I briefly tried it out, it did install packages in a way
that pip could recognise - so maybe something has changed?

Paul