Glyph has suggested something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. "let me use setup_requires somehow so I can have abstractions in setup.py".
setup.py allows you to pass setup_requires = [] to the setup() call. Unfortunately, since setup.py needs setup_requires to be installed before it can run, this feature is crap. It also has the unfortunate side effect of recursively calling easy_install and installing the listed packages even when pip or no installer is being used. Instead, I'd like to allow a list of requirements in setup.cfg: [a section name] setup-requires = somepackage > 4.0 anotherpackage >= 3.2.1 As an alternative we could look for a file setup-requires.txt which would be the same as a pip-format requirements file. I prefer doing it in setup.cfg because people are used to that file, and because it only accepts package names and not general pip or easy_install command line arguments. This would be simple and a tremendous boon to anyone considering implementing a setup.py-emulating distutils replacement, or to anyone who just likes abstractions. Metadata 2.0 is not a solution for this problem. It's late, it's more complicated, and for any "legacy" packages setup.py is the thing that generates metadata.json - not something that can only run if you parse a skeletal metadata.json, do what it says, and then overwrite metadata.json when dist_info is called. Daniel _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
