[Biopython-dev] Requiring setuptools (on top of recommending pip)?

[Peter Cock]

Logged on GitHub as https://github.com/biopython/biopython/issues/1183

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 12:34 PM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> If you are not interested in the packaging details for how we release
> Biopython, you can stop reading now.
>
> According to https://packaging.python.org/current/ we should
> recommend using pip for installation (which we now do), and
> use setuptools to define projects and create Source Distributions
> (which we no not take advantage of fully).
>
> According to https://packaging.python.org/installing/ we can
> assume both pip and setuptools are available on Python 2.7.9
> and 3.4 onwards (possibly after invoking ensurepip). Note
> we've deprecated and are likely to soon drop Python 3.3
> support [*].
>
> With Biopython 1.69 we included a minimal requirments.txt file
> which makes it easy to install our numpy dependency but we do
> not yet specify numpy via install_requires in setup.py - in part
> because we do not yet assume setuptools will be present. Here's
> a nice explanation of these two mechanisms and the differing
> usecases: https://caremad.io/posts/2013/07/setup-vs-requirement/
>
> In short I would like to require setuptools be present for building
> Biopython, which will let us simply our setup.py file and take
> advantage of many of the meta-data fields which we currently
> omit (e.g. classifiers for which versions of Python supported,
> which gets advertised on PyPI etc).
>
> Peter
>
> [*] http://mailman.open-bio.org/pipermail/biopython-dev/2017-April/021674.html