setuptools without unexpected downloads

[John]

On Sep 27, 11:42 am, Istvan Albert <istvan.alb... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sep 26, 2:09 am, Ben Finney <b... at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
>
> > behaviour with a specific invocation of 'setup.py'. But how can I
> > disallow this from within the 'setup.py' program, so my users don't
> > have to be aware of this unexpected default behaviour?
>
> I don't have the answer for this, but I can tell you that I myself
> dislike the auto-download behavior and I wish it worked differently.
>
> I've given up on setuptools/easy-install altogether. It is most
> annoying to end up with half a dozen unexpected packages.
>
> The default behavior should be to pop a question with a list of
> packages that will be downloaded (and have a flag that bypasses this).
> And of course being able to turn off this feature from setup.py.
>
> i.

I think you're exactly right, Istvan. Maybe someone will write a patch
for what you suggest.

I haven't done any packaging myself, but it would seem to me that
another trick users could resort to might be to look at the setup.py
setup() function's install_requires arg, and then try to install
what's listed there using their own system's package management
software.

I'm not exactly sure what the --no-deps arg to easy_install does. Does
it force the named package to install without its dependencies, or
does it give a package listing and then bail out without installing
anything? The docs don't seem to specify.

---John