[Distutils] setup_requires for dev environments

[Paul Moore]

On 16 March 2015 at 17:14, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> The bulk of the effort of pushing the standards, pip, and PyPI through is done
> by a handful of people, and of those handful I believe that the largest share
> is done by myself. That's not to toot my own horn or any such nonsense but to
> simply state the fact that the available bandwidth of people able and willing
> to work on problems is low. However the things we bless here as official are
> things which need to be able to last for a decade or more, which means that
> they do need careful consideration before we bless them.

As a serious question - is there anything I (or indeed anyone else)
can do to make progress on PEP 426? If I'm honest, right now I don't
exactly see what tool changes are needed to change it from draft to
accepted to actually implemented.

As far as I can see, acceptance consists largely of someone, somehow,
confirming that there are no major loopholes in the spec. I think that
mostly comes down to the fact that no-one has raised objections since
the PEP was published, plus someone with experience of some of the
more difficult distribution scenarios sanity-checking things. And
then, getting it implemented in tools.

I guess the tool side consists of:

1. Making pip write a pydist.json file when installing from wheel.
2. Making setuptools write pydist.json when installing from sdist, and
when creating a sdist.
3. Making wheel write pydist.json when writing a wheel.

(Also, when distlib writes a wheel, it should write pydist.json, but
I'm considering distlib as "non-core" for the sake of this
discussion).

There's also presumably work to add support for specifying some of the
new metadata in setup.py, which I guess is setuptools work again.

Have I missed anything crucial?
Paul

PS I'm ignoring the "standard metadata extensions" PEP where console
wrappers, and post-install scripts figure. Those are probably bigger
design issues.