setuptools setup.py commands are unintuitive and undiscoverable (--help-commands should replace --help)
jimbo1qaz
jimbo1qaz at gmail.com
Fri Apr 27 00:06:23 EDT 2018
Frequently I have encountered projects packaged using setuptools, with a
setup.py. To find out how to install it, I usually turned to Stack Overflow
(https://stackoverflow.com/a/1472014) which doesn't explain what options
exist or do.
Surprisingly, neither "setup.py" nor "setup.py --help" doesn't provide a
list of options either, instead telling you how to show various metadata
options which are not useful to end users of the software project, trying
to build/install it.
Instead, to show a list of useful actions a user can perform, you need to
use "setup.py --help-commands", which I only discovered several years after
starting to use Python. Why isn't this command enabled by default (called
without arguments, or with --help).
https://imgur.com/a/HF4Iw6D
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