[Distutils] PEP439 and backward compat / easy_install / distlib

[Ronald Oussoren]

On 25 Mar, 2013, at 19:16, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Also, as far as detecting the need for setuptools, I think that can be
> done just by noticing whether the PKG-INFO included in an sdist is
> metadata 2.0 or not.  If it is, then setuptools should be explicitly
> declared as a build-time dependency, otherwise it's not needed.  If
> it's an older metadata version, then you probably need setuptools.

Is it even necessary to automaticly install setuptools? Setuptools-using package are supposed to use  ez_setup.py, or distribute_setup.py for distribute, to ensure that the setuptools package is available during setup.  Although I must admit that I have no idea how many packages still do this instead of assuming that users will have installed setuptools anyway.

Ronald