Make Djblets package develop mode compatible with wheels and npm packages.

Review Request #8493 — Created Oct. 26, 2016 and submitted — Latest diff uploaded

Information

Djblets
release-0.10.x
0645a30...

Reviewers

Djblets's packaging, and the world of Python packaging in general, has
gotten increasingly complex with time. Wheels are the preferred (and
better supported) format in the packaging world, and eggs are on their
way out. We also require a handful of node.js modules for static media
building.

This change adds significant improvements to our packaging setup, in
order to cover these issues and more.

setup.py is now driven almost entirely by metadata within the package.
It no longer lists dependencies, but rather makes use of a new
djblets.dependencies module, which lists all the npm and Python package
dependencies needed by Djblets. This allows for a couple of things.
Primarily, it allows us to consolidate all dependencies/version ranges
in one place. It also allows consumers of Djblets to refer to the same
versions for their own uses.

The setup.py develop command has been enhanced to install dependencies
via wheels. It does this by first ensuring we have a modern
pip/setuptools, and then invokes pip install -e ., which will perform
the equivalent of setup.py develop but with Wheels. (Behind the
scenes, it actually uses setup.py develop with shims to install the
wheel versions, so it's otherwise fully compatible.)

After that, it installs all the packages required for development (using
dev-requirements.txt), and then installs required modules from npm
(or npm-cache, if --use-npm-cache is installed).

The end result is that contributors to Djblets now only need to run
setup.py develop to have a fully working environment going.

Set up a brand new virtual environment and started fresh in the Djblets
source tree (no Djblets.egg-info, node_modules, dist, or build).

Ran ./setup.py develop. Saw that it upgraded setuptools and pip
and then installed the main package dependencies and development
dependencies. Following that, it installed the node.js modules.

Checked that all expected packages and files were installed. Successfully
ran all unit tests.