Comment 0 for bug 254035

The {{{setuptools_darcs}}} plugin is often a problem. We need to fix this, by either bundling that package and making the use-bundled-packages feature work, or by no longer requiring {{{setuptools_darcs}}}. This plugin is actually needed only for producing source packages from source -- not for producing binary packages nor for installing locally. The reason that it is required by default is that if someone does get a copy of our source tree and then tries to use it to produce a new source tree (i.e. by running {{{./setup.py sdist}}}, then without the {{{setuptools_darcs}}} plugin they will get a bad (incomplete) source package with no warning or error message. In order to minimize the chance that somebody stubs their toe on that corner case, I have made the {{{setuptools_darcs}}} plugin mandatory.