Consistency of documentation of what version of setuptools is required

[ksunden]

Currently there are references to the required version being:

• >=60
  • README.md
• >=61
  • runtime warning
  • your own pyproject.toml buld requirements
  • your test workflow
• >=62
  • docs/usage.md
• >=64
  • docs/index.md
  • docs/customizing.md
  • docs/examples/.../pyproject.toml

At various places in the docs/code.

Additionally, there is a comment that states:

https://github.com/pypa/setuptools_scm/blob/ceca2352f09ed22f825f45a392cca5aff83c6aff/docs/index.md?plain=1#L16-L17

However, the pyproject.toml does include setuptools as a runtime dependency, but does so with no pin, allowing broken environments to exist:

https://github.com/pypa/setuptools_scm/blob/ceca2352f09ed22f825f45a392cca5aff83c6aff/pyproject.toml#L48

Making these sources consistent would be appreciated, as it is rather hard to tell what I actually need to do as a user.

In my case, build isolation was getting most recent setuptools but then installing into an env that had older setuptools, and we have setuptools_scm as an optional dependency to get updated version numbers for editable installs. But because nothing pinned a version for runtime, it warned (which turned into errors in the test suite).

[mayeut]

The issue was also reported from NumPy CI when building ninja: scikit-build/ninja-python-distributions#226 (comment)
The PyPI ninja distribution has no direct dependency on setuptools. The dependency comes from scikit-build-core when using dynamic metadata which adds setuptools-scm as a build dependency (but not setuptools).
As noted by @ksunden, is there any reason not to add a lower bound pin on setuptools in pyproject.toml dependencies ?

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

For a while there was

But modern tooling is more avaliable since quite a while

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

the 9.0 release will be the last release with non-pinned setuptools for legacy deployment reasons- the 10.0 release will pin setuptools 80 as minimum