[Distutils] PEP 517: Bootstrapping setuptools

[xoviat]

Of course, to be frank, the principle failure with this plan is that
third-party tools (buildout, os packagers) will not be compliant with PEP
517 even after it is adopted, and will then complain about having to update
their build systems.

2017-08-21 16:05 GMT-05:00 xoviat <xoviat at gmail.com>:

> Previously, the attempt to move setuptools off of vendored dependencies
> failed because it was not done correctly: install_requires was set to the
> vendored dependencies but not setup_requires, which would have been
> required to correctly specify dependencies. However, setup_requires would
> have introduced circular dependencies that are impossible to correctly
> resolve, so that would have simply shifted an impossible problem onto pip.
>
> The principle issue then, is that setuptools requires setuptools to build
> itself. And although, this problem was previously not worth solving because
> of 'setup.py install', it is now not a difficult problem to solve if we
> rethink slightly what should be included in the setuptools respository:
> - Rather than re-generating egg_info on each setup.py invocation, we can
> cache dist-info in the setuptools respository.
> - We can implement a simple entry_points script that updates dist-info
> based on the contents of setup.py, which is only runnable of course after
> setuptools is installed
> - We can implement the reference build backend for setuptools: simply copy
> the files and dist-info into a new compliant zip archive
>
> Viola! Setuptools is no longer required to build setuptools, and the
> installation process is fully compliant with Python PEPs.
>
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