issue_comments: 667657310

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/4295#issuecomment-667657310 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/4295 667657310 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDY2NzY1NzMxMA== 14808389 2020-08-02T10:38:36Z 2020-08-02T10:38:36Z MEMBER

the reason we install-depend on setuptools is that we use pkg_resources for constructing the version with setuptools_scm and for getting the paths to images and css used for the HTML repr. Both of these can be replaced with modules in the standard library: importlib.resources (available since 3.7) and importlib.metadata (available since 3.8). Both also have backports (importlib-resources and importlib-metadata), so we should be able to get rid of the install-dependency on setuptools.

setup_requires has been deprecated in favor of specifying the build dependency in pyproject.toml. Maybe we should use that instead? That way we don't have to care about users failing to bootstrap setuptools because pip will create a isolated environment with just the build dependencies, build the source into a wheel and then install that without using setuptools. So I think that means you can have a old version of setuptools installed in your environment and still pip-install a package that requires a newer version.

An additional advantage is that our setup.py can become ```python from setuptools import setup

if name == "main": setup() `` (we can't removesetup.py` entirely because it's required for editable installs)

 
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