On 6 August 2015 at 00:10, Donald Stufft <don...@stufft.io> wrote: > Just a small correction, in general setuptools does blur that line, but > for pip itself setuptools is completely a build time dependency which > isn’t *technically* any different than our dependency on wheel. We work > perfectly fine without it installed you just don’t get certain features > available to you if you don’t have it installed. However we left > setuptools installing because the feature you lose if you don’t have it > pre-installed is the ability to install from sdists entirely. It was > determined that not being able to install from sdists was a large enough > “breakage” that considering setuptools a dependency of pip in the terms > of ensurepip was considered better than minimizing the things we bundled.
Sorry, I omitted a downstream-related step in my thought process there. We currently have a hard dependency from python to pip and setuptools in Fedora, so we can ensure ensurepip works properly inside virtual environments. Enough things require setuptools at runtime for pkg_resources that that falls into the category of "annoying runtime dependency we'd like to see go away, but we can live with it since a lot of production systems are still going to end up with it installed regardless of what's in the base image". A hard dependency on wheel wouldn't fit into the same category - when folks are using a build pipeline to minimise the installation footprint on production systems, the wheel package itself has no business being installed anywhere other than developer systems and build servers. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
