Use declarative setup.cfg

[venthur]

What's the problem this feature will solve?

Setuptools allows for a more declarative setup.cfg instead of having lots of stuff in setup.py

Describe the solution you'd like

Move most of the stuff from setup.py to setup.cfg

Alternative Solutions

Additional context

[pradyunsg]

Thanks for filing this issue @venthur! This is a great idea but now is not the right time to do this IMO.

There are still quite a few users on older systems that upgrade to newer pip versions from them and this change would render them incapable of doing so. That'll mean figuring out the amount of such use (installing pip from older version of pip). I haven't looked at the numbers (would have to write an SQL query for BigQuery) but would imagine there's quite a few folks who do that.

Even if that's a low occurrence case though, I still don't think we should do this right now. This isn't all that painful in any way for the maintainers/users and pip's "churn budget" is pretty low given the growing pains of rolling out PEP 517; spending it on a change which does not provide much functional value to us wouldn't be great.

Slightly OT: FWIW, I want to even move pip over to a different build backend (away from setuptools) if something easier/nicer shows up, but it's a little early in the PEP 517 adoption curve to do that.

[ichard26]

And pip now uses setuptools' pyproject.toml support and doesn't even have a setup.py or setup.cfg sooo this can be closed :)

[ichard26]

@pfmoore if you feel like pressing more buttons, here are two more issues that can be closed:

• Deal with Sphinx 4.4.0 extlinks warnings #10813
• pip uninstall calls normalize_path excessively, hurting performance on Windows #11889