Trying to run pip install . from a source checkout will fail with "could not find package.json" issue. Installing from a pre-generated sdist (which is what happen with pip install chemisope) is fine, so this should not impact most users.

The core of the issue is that we use the same version number for the python package & the npm package, so python setup.py read the version number in package.json, which is symlinked in python/package.json. pip install . tries to isolate the build, and copy the python/ directory to a temporary location, where it can not find the symlinked file.

python setup.py install and the versions uploaded on PyPI works fine, so I don't think we have to worry about this.

This is tracked upstream in pypa/pip#3500