Bug#684560: [gaphor] gaphor requires python-setuptools

[Gediminas Paulauskas]

2012/8/25 Jakub Wilk <jwilk at debian.org>:
> * Arnaud Fontaine <arnau at debian.org>, 2012-08-25, 17:05:
>>
>> After investigating a bit this  issue, it seems that both zope.component
>> and its requirement,  zope.interface, does 'install_requires' setuptools
>> because pkg_resources is required for  zope namespace, but after install
>> requires.txt ends up with setuptools.
>>
>> One solution would  be to patch setup.py to  remove the install_requires
>> line for setuptools, but it will be  required in a lot of packages, so I'm
>> wondering if dh_python2 should handle that automatically  or with a specific
>> option? What do you think? Thanks!
>
> The current behviour of dh_python2 is IMHO errant. It should either
> 1) translate "setuptools" in requires.txt into dependency on
> python-setuptools or
> 2) remove "setuptools" from requires.txt when translating it into dependency
> on python-pkg-resources.

dh_python2 does 2) for a year already:

python-defaults (2.7.2-2) experimental; urgency=low

  [ Piotr Ożarowski ]
  * dh_python2:
...
    - remove setuptools from requires.txt (it is replaced with
      python-pkg-resources Debian dependency)
...

Most likely the packages mentioned have not been rebuild since then.
Or they use dh_pydeb (from python-van.pydeb) that does not remove
setuptools from requires.txt

> Looking at the problem with other side: should "setuptools" be in
> requires.txt in the first place if the package uses only pkg_resources?
> pkg_resources is _the_ thing that checks these requirements after all. I
> mean, it's like adding dpkg to Depends because you can't install the package
> without dpkg... :)

Most zope packages depend on setuptools. You are right that it is not
really needed, but for historical reasons it is there upstream for
many packages.

-- 
Gediminas