[Distutils] setup_requires: the obvious option(?)

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016, at 05:51 PM, Antony Lee wrote:
> I am not really a fan of PEP518 in general.  Basically, the idea of
> setup.py is that declarative languages are not sufficient to express a
> build system (and AFAICT this is always going to be the case for
> expressing, say, compiler flags for extensions), so I'd rather just
> accept that and stick everything in setup.py instead of adding more
> parameter files.  What if someone wants dynamic build dependencies?

Dynamic build deps aren't precluded - the idea is that the build system
can discover additional dependencies when it runs, while the static build-
system field specifies just what's required to run the build system
itself.  However, the build system interface was split out into separate
PEPs (517 & 516 are alternatives) to allow 518 to go forwards.

I take totally the opposite view: we should make as much metadata as
possible declarative, even though we know we can't define a totally
general build system with purely declarative information.
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