[Biopython-dev] numpy setup-time dependency workaround

[Peter Cock]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 5:53 PM, Manuel Nuno Melo
<manuel.nuno.melo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, I understand that the limited install might be desirable under some
> circumstances.
> Maybe adding some argument-parsing capabilities to setup.py so that one
> could invoke
> ./setup.py install --nonumpy
> (pip could be made to also accept flags to this end with
> --install-option="--nonumpy")
> Python implementations where C-compiled code isn't supported would just
> silently ignore the flags and skip any numpy-related stuff.
>
> My point here is that a user wouldn't have to actively preinstall numpy.
> "pip install biopython" would just work.
>
> What do you think?

I'd like "pip install biopython" to just work, meaning install numpy
if not already present.

But for now, we also want "python setup.py install" etc without pip
to work for out-of-the-box installation with Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.3
where pip is probably not present. Here it should at least tell the
user to install numpy - thus the current prompt.

Is there any easy way for setup.py to know if it is inside pip, and
declare the dependencies, versus the current behaviour?

Peter