[Distutils] setup_requires for dev environments

[Paul Moore]

On 17 March 2015 at 11:49, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> I'm still not clear what you expect pip to *do* with the metadata.
>> It's just data, there's no functionality specified in the PEP.
>
> What pip does now with metadata, Look at it for dependency information when
> installing the Wheel, show it when doing ``pip show``, handle the Provides
> metadata making something “Provide” something else, show warnings for the
> obsoleted-by metadata, handle extensions (including failing if there is a
> critical extension we don’t understand).

Hmm, OK.

At the moment that stuff (except pip show) is all covered by the
running of the egg_info command, I guess. So you're saying that pip
should first check if a requirement has new-style metadata and if it
does, skip the egg_info command and use pydist.json. I guess that
would be good - it'd solve the problems we see with numpy-related
packages that need things installed just to run setup.py egg_info.

It wasn't something I'd particularly considered, but thanks for the
clarification.

Paul