[Distutils] Not installing the install_requires

[Paul Moore]

2009/7/16 Sridhar Ratnakumar <sridharr at activestate.com>:
> From my experience in building all the pypi packages, I can confirm that a
> significant number of packages (> 10 at least), fail to build[1] because it
> cannot read a file (usually LICENSE.txt, version.txt, README.txt in the
> sdist root) using __file__.
>
> It is unfortunate that we have this mess.

PEP 302 and imports from zip files have been round since Python 2.3.
Unfortunately, very few people write their packages with the idea that
they may not be loaded from the filesystem in mind. As a result, we
have things like the "not zip safe" flag in setuptools.

I wish this didn't happen, but I don't know how to stop it. Partially,
it may be because the support for getting data resources in PEP 302 is
minimal, but equally the support is minimal because no-one has
proposed adding anything extra, and that's because no-one tries to use
it, and...

Even setuptools/pkg_resources hasn't encouraged people to fix stuff
like this :-(

Paul.

PS If someone were to propose some extra PEP 302 features, I'd be
happy to help get them added and support incorporated into the stdlib.