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

[Peter Cock]

Pull request created for comment:

https://github.com/biopython/biopython/pull/1293

I would like to include this in Biopython 1.70 as noted here:
http://mailman.open-bio.org/pipermail/biopython-dev/2017-June/021763.html

Peter

On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 12:36 PM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 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