[Distutils] setup_requires for dev environments

[Wichert Akkerman]

> On 18 Mar 2015, at 17:49, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 18 March 2015 at 16:02, Ionel Cristian Mărieș <contact at ionelmc.ro> wrote:
>> one certainly doesn't need to shoehorn a full blown build system into
>> setup.py - there's make, invoke, shell scripts and plenty of other systems
>> that can do that just fine.
> 
> Just to insert a little history here, before distutils (setup.py) was
> invented, Python packages used all sorts of tools to build. Often
> shell scripts and/or make were used, which in essence meant that the
> packages were unusable on Windows - even if there was no need for them
> to be.

For what it’s worth I have C++ Python module which is build using CMake, and the experience has been extremely pleasant. CMake has lots of useful documentation, while trying to figure out how to do OS and package detection to figure out the right compile and link options for distutils is an awful experience and leads to nightmares such as https://github.com/python-pillow/Pillow/blob/master/setup.py or https://github.com/lxml/lxml/blob/master/setup.py

Wichert.