[Distutils] setup_requires for dev environments

[Paul Moore]

Just a couple of comments

On 18 March 2015 at 15:33, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal
<chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> I suppose it's too late now, but the really painful parts of all this
> seem to be due to overly aggressive backward compatibility. We now
> have wheels, but also eggs, we now have pip, but also easy_install,
> etc.

Agreed. But the problem we have here is that any system that fails to
work for even a tiny proportion of packages on PyPI is a major issue.
And we don't have *any* control over those packages - if they do the
most insane things in their setup.py, and don't release a new version
using new tools, we have to support those insane things, or deal with
the bug reports.

Maybe we should say "sorry, your package needs to change or we won't
help", but traditionally the worst packaging arguments have started
that way (see, for example, the distribute or distutils2 flamewars).
People are much more positive these days, so maybe we could do
something along those lines, but it's hard to test that assumption
without risking the peace...

> Final note: setuptools has always bugged me, even though it provides
> some great features. I think all my struggles with it come down to a
> key issue: it does not make clear distinctions between what should
> happen at build-time vs install-time vs run-time.

Agreed entirely. It's a long slow process though to migrate away from
the problems of setuptools without losing the great features at the
same time...

Thanks for your thoughts!
Paul