[Distutils] setup_requires for dev environments

[Paul Moore]

On 17 March 2015 at 11:30, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> That's a fair request. Something I perhaps haven't been clear about is
> that PEP 426 is *just* an interoperability spec - it defines the
> interfaces between tools so they can share a common data model.

I think that was pretty clear actually. The problem is that as an
interoperability spec, it shouldn't really be blocking any work going
on, and yet it does seem to - setup_requires, postinstall scripts,
things like that get stalled by "when Metadata 2.0 is signed off". In
reality, even a *draft* of Metadata 2.0 should be making stuff like
that easier. People wanting to implement the actual behaviour should
be able to write their code in terms of "some API to get the Metadata
2.0 data" and then go from there. We can add any kind of hack we want
for now to provide that API, safe in the knowledge that later we can
change that API without invalidating the feature. It's just that that
isn't really happening at the moment.

Maybe another thing to work on is a basic "get_metadata" API in the
packaging library, to be that to-be-improved hack?

Paul