setup.py now imports setuptools

[ilanschnell]

Why is setuptools now required inside setup.py? Using setuptools make packages much harder to build. I would much rather prefer setuptools not being used. Thanks.

[llllllllll]

This was used so that people can do setup.py develop. What does setuptools make more difficult?

[ilanschnell]

When you use setuptools, all the install requirements need to installed at build time, because otherwise setuptools will try to fetch them on the fly, which is not what we want (at least not when building conda packages). Also setuptools always tried to create .egg directories in site-packages, which are problematic because their path needs to be added to easy-install.pth. From my perspective setuptools is the source of almost all packaging problems Python is suffering from.

Having conda-build installed, you can say:

$ conda develop

[llllllllll]

I don't think there have been any issues with the conda builds for blaze, datashape or odo. Also, not everyone uses conda.

[ilanschnell]

But everyone should be using conda :-) Anyway, if you want to use setuptools, that ok (I guess). I personally avoid it like the plague.