Does building pure python modules w/ conda require setuptools?

Question

This weekend I've been reading up on conda and the python packaging user guide because I have a simple pure python project that depends on numpy. It seemed to me that distributing/installing this project via conda was better than pip due to this dependency.

One thing on which I'm still not clear: conda will install a python package from a recipe in build.sh, but it seems like build.sh just ends up calling python setup.py install for most python packages.

So even if I want to distribute/install my python package with conda, I still end up depending on setuptools (or distutils) for the actual installation, correct? I was unable to find a conda utility analogous to setuptools; am I missing something?

FWIW, I posted this question on the conda issue tracker.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Typically you will still be using distutils (or setuptools if the library requires it) to install things, yes. It is not technically required. The build.sh can be anything. If you wanted to, you could just copy the code into site-packages. Using setup.py install is recommended, though, as libraries will already have setup.py working, it will install metadata that can be read by pip, and it will compile any extension modules and install any data files.