[Distutils] setup_requires: the obvious option(?)

[Daniel Holth]

On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 4:06 PM Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>
> On Aug 30, 2016, at 2:32 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> name, version, packages, install_requires, extras_require, description,
> license, classifiers, keywords, author, url, entry_points.
>
>
> Out of these, a number of them are regularly dynamic for people’s setup.py
> as is. The version number is often dynamically computed based on things
> like git tags, packages can be computed based on Python version,
> install_requires and extras_requires regularly get computed based on things
> like Python version, OS, etc (although environment markers eases some of
> this) but also things like “We support Numpy >= for building from source,
> but once you’ve built from source you only support Numpy >=
> VERSION_YOU_BUILT_AGAINST”.
>
> Outside of “name”, it’s not entirely unreasonable to find reasons why a
> lot of things need to be dynamic. Although there’s a difference in what
> needs to be dynamic when pulling from a VCS and when pulling from a sdist,
> and currently there’s not really a whole lot of difference in terms of
> capability or how they are handled.
>

Of course pip continues to call egg_info before trusting the metadata from
any sdist and 90k pypi projects say this isn't changing. Once you need
dynamic static metadata, madness.

In other systems I've worked on I sometimes have make-like rules that
automatically rebuild static metadata depending on other files, like
copying a version number between a .json and an .xml file - reprogramming
the system that uses the .xml file is not an option. For example a rule
could watch certain files in the .git directory to regenerate a version
number automatically as part of the build if .git changed, and do nothing
if the .git directory was absent per a tarball dist. This works pretty
well. Once you have a system that's easy to customize with make-like rules
there are all sorts of trivial build or housekeeping tasks you might decide
to do which would never be considered in a more difficult to customize
system.
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