setuptools

If you're building anything past a hello world c ext you're already off the path of shit like poetry, in which case AIUI we're basically on our own as we've always been lol, for better and worse. Again I don't think setup.py is going away. Given that distsetuputiltools is a jenga tower of decades old monkeypatches documentation is understandably sparse, but they're at least passively open about how gross it is to work within. Subclassing or otherwise manually overriding the behavior of distutils classes like build_* is just how stuff is done at this level and I don't expect that to change, beyond just updating your stuff to subclass or hook direct setuptools equivs of existing distutils classes. distutils is already vendored by setuptools anyway, so you're already not really hitting 'distutils' as much as 'setuptools._distutils' aliased t

True, but the problem is that in pursuit of that mantra the language has wound up disempowering engineers and has forced even more decisions about trade-offs onto them: do you want readability, performance, or maintainability? You usually can't have all of them because of some lurking performance tar pit. An example here is the conflict between needing top level imports for sanity and static analysis (there was an instagram blog on this a while ago) while also wanting fast startup time. If you import requests at the top level then you cannot have fast startup time, so you wind up importing it outside the top level so that code paths that don't use requests don't have to pay the time cost of loading it, but then you have imports that aren't at the top level! edit: oh, and don't even get me started on pkg_resources [0], which isn't just a t