Using distro in setup.py

[AbdealiLoKo]

Hi, I want to use distro to choose what to do in setup.py. I was wondering if there's some recommended way of doing this ?

The ideas we've thought of:

• Using setup_requires, We're not sure this is a good method of doing it - There have been quite a few bugs with it (On windows, old versions of pip, etc.)
• There was a suggestion of directly downloading https://github.com/nir0s/distro/blob/master/distro.py and importing that using urllib.

I wanted to ensure that I use the recommended way so that the app doesn't break later.

[AbdealiLoKo]

Bump, would love some input on this ?

[nir0s]

So, I haven't heard of someone using distro in setup.py yet so it's hard for me to tell you what's the "recommended" way of doing that. setup_requires sounds like a good idea though I'm not familiar with its windows breakages.

If you know you have pip in your environment, you can call subprocess to install distro via pip (I wouldn't use pip directly from Python as its API is not official - thus the subprocess method) and then import it. somewhat hacky, but will work cross platform and should never break.

[AbdealiLoKo]

Nod, I found https://bitbucket.org/dholth/setup-requires which was mentioned in pypa/pip#1820 which describes that rather than using setup_requires a subprocess invoking pip may be the best bet for reliability.

[nir0s]

I would appreciate a PR for the docs stating that as a use case and how you solved it eventually.

[AbdealiLoKo]

@nir0s Agree, I'll do that after I have sufficiently tested the method I'm using right now.
I also noticed that there's an issue in pip and pip may soon depend on distro ... pypa/pip#3823

So, in that case maybe we wouldn't even need that extra documentation as distro would be available due to pip itself ?

[andy-maier]

If pip is ready to integrate distro (as indicated in pypa/pip#3823), then I think we should release distro 1.0.0, to make it clear that the API is stable from now on (at least within 1.x.x).

[nir0s]

Sounds reasonable to me.

[nir0s]

@andy-maier , pip already merged 0.6.0. I guess we should still release 1.0.0 after we add the CLI. Does that make sense?

[nir0s]

@AbdealiJK, any updates on this? Interested in submitting that PR or can I close this?

[AbdealiLoKo]

I'm a bit busy right now, so no PR at the moment.

To give a brief idea for others who have the same issue, I had to call pip install using subprocess to install the package to the current directory - https://github.com/pywikibot-catfiles/file-metadata/blob/master/setupdeps.py#L49
This seems to work fine (although pip install is called twice)

There seems to be no elegant solution at this time that I was able to use without problems.