Dealing with deprecation of ez_setup.py for non-install commands

The documentation of setuptools points out that ez_setup.py is deprecated in favor of pyproject.toml and pip.

If I am currently in a directory with a Python package that uses ez_setup.py, I can run any python setup.py <command> and setuptools is then made available during the setup.py process.

Once there is a stable release of pip that supports pyproject.toml, it will be possible to do pip install . instead of python setup.py install and this will get setuptools on the fly if needed.

However, this doesn’t solve the issue of how to deal with other commands. For example, if I run python setup.py test there is no such thing as using pip, so how does one ensure that setuptools is automatically available in this scenario? Is the only way to require users to pip install setuptools before running python setup.py test?

(edited for clarity)

[ghost]

The intended workflow is that when you first clone a project, you will run pip install -e .. You will then edit files, run commands, or otherwise work on the project. After you’re done, you will run pip uninstall .. Also, running setup.py directly will (after a long period of deprecation) be transitioned to implementation-defined behavior. For testing, you will need to run your testing framework in the project directory, with something like py.test.

[JensTimmerman]

Will it also provide a bdist_rpm command?