Generated setup.py should use setuptools.setup instead of distutils.core.setup

[seifertm]

• I am on the latest Poetry version.

• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe that this is not a duplicate.

• If an exception occurs when executing a command, I executed it again in debug mode (-vvv option).

• OS version and name: Gentoo Linux

• Poetry version: 0.12.11

The command poetry build generates a setup.py file based on the contents of pyproject.toml. The setup file imports distutils.core.setup as the setup function, but passes build arguments that are only available in setuptools.setup, such as entry_points. When the package is installed via pip, this is not an issue, because pip still uses setuptools.setup, regardless of what is imported (see the distutils docs). However, other package managers may run into issues, because they use distutils. My distribution's package manager (Portage) generates warnings:

usr/lib64/python3.6/distutils/dist.py:261: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'install_requires'
  warnings.warn(msg)
/usr/lib64/python3.6/distutils/dist.py:261: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'entry_points'
  warnings.warn(msg)
/usr/lib64/python3.6/distutils/dist.py:261: UserWarning: Unknown distribution option: 'python_requires'
  warnings.warn(msg)

In this case, no scripts will be installed, because the entry_points argument is not applicable for distutils.

Since setup.py uses features that are explicitly part of setuptools, but not distutils, I suggest that setuptools.setup should be imported. Would you accept a PR for this?

[opoplawski]

This is becoming a problem in Fedora as well. In particular we are seeing file based egg-info being generated rather than directories, which can cause issues with RPM.

[roniemartinez]

I just started testing poetry to see what's on it. Checked the generated setup.py and I didn't like it.

from distutils.core import setup

Quoting from https://docs.python.org/3/library/distutils.html

Most Python users will not want to use this module directly, but instead use the cross-version tools maintained by the Python Packaging Authority.

Sadly, I am one of these people. This issue should be a top priority.

[decathorpe]

For all fedora builds of python packages that were published with poetry, I have to patch the generated setup.py file to use setuptools instead of distutils, because otherwise the packages don't get built correctly. The default behaviour should totally be to use setup from setuptools in the template.

[pwwang]

Is there a workaround on this with poetry v0.12.16?

[eli-schwartz]

My solution was to create distro packages of "dephell" for the Arch Linux distribution and use https://dephell.readthedocs.io/cmd-deps-convert.html to convert pyproject.toml into a usable setup.py file. I just download the source tarball from GitHub instead of PyPI, and as a result I also get testsuite files.

[pwwang]

@eli-schwartz Thanks, this worked out!

But I think the team still has to put this on higher priority.

[eli-schwartz]

Sure, happy to help. But you're correct that "don't use poetry, use something else" is not remotely optimal. I too am waiting for a better solution in poetry itself.

[techdragon]

I'm going to be including a fix for this in my work to fix #1350 since there is currently an outstanding PR ( pypa/setuptools#1767 ) to bring setuptools in line with wheel and current documented practices regarding package license metadata, pip uses setuptools and I sincerely doubt there will be much traction trying to update distutils. So using setuptools directly just make sense.