Missing item in the requirements list

Since numexpr` v2.8 setuptoolsis used in a couple modules, so it should be listed in therequirements.txt`` file.

More precisely, the vendored copy of packaging is actually used. Probably it could make more sense to depend directly on packaging.

If needed I can provide a PR for this.

[avalentino]

@robbmcleod not sure to understand your point. Yes distutils is deprecated and setuptools is the natural replacement (not the only one). I agree with you that using setuptools in the setup.py is the obvious solution at the moment.

Anyways I’m talking about the use of setuptools in the numbexpr package itself (namely expressions.py and test_numexpr.py). In this case you don’t need complex features provided by setuptools, you just need functions related to management of version parsing and comparison. That functions are provided by the packaging standalone package that is considered as a reference implementation of some of the current standard for Python packaging and used by several tools to build more complex features. setuptools itself uses packaging. The reason why they currently vendor it are not relevant in this context IMHO.

Also our use case perfectly matches one of the “Migration advice” provided in PEP632 [1] (distutils deprecation).

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0632/#migration-advice

In conclusion, leaving out philosophical considerations, the real point is that whenever we decide to use setuptools or packaging we should document that it is a runtime requirement. Indeed we cannot assume that they are always installed since it is not true in several contexts, like e.g. conda packages and packages provided by GNU/Linux distributions like Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora/Redhat.

@emjohnson20 not sure that your problem is related to this specific issue.

You should use not use setup.py directly but rather the recommended

$ python3 -m pip install .

or

$ python3 -m build .

[avalentino]

Perfect, thanks a lot @robbmcleod