Introduction
============
d2to1 (the 'd' is for 'distutils') allows using distutils2-like setup.cfg files 
for a package's metadata with a distribute/setuptools setup.py script.  It
works by providing a distutils2-formatted setup.cfg file containing all of a
package's metadata, and a very minimal setup.py which will slurp its arguments
from the setup.cfg.

Motivation
==========
I'm currently in the progress of redoing the packaging of a sizeable number of
projects.  I wanted to use distutils2-like setup.cfg files for all these
projects, as they will hopefully be the future, and I much prefer them overall
to using an executable setup.py.  So forward-support for distutils2 is
appealing both as future-proofing, and simply the aesthetics of using a flat text file to describe a project's metadata.

However, I did not want any of these projects to require distutils2 for
installation yet--it is too unstable, and not widely installed.  So projects
should still be installable using the familiar `./setup.py install`, for
example.  Furthermore, not all use cases supported required by some of these
packages are fully supported by distutils2 yet.  Hopefully they will be
eventually, either through the distutils2 core or through extensions.  But in
the meantime d2to1 will try to keep up with the state of the art and "best
practices" for distutils2 distributions, while adding support in areas that
it's lacking.

Usage
=====
d2to1 requires a distribution to use distribute or setuptools.  Your
distribution must include a distutils2-like setup.cfg file, and a minimal
setup.py script.  For details on writing the setup.cfg, see the `distutils2
documentation`_.  The minimal setup.py should look something like this::

 #!/usr/bin/env python

 try:
     from setuptools import setup
 except ImportError:
     from distribute_setup import use_setuptools
     use_setuptools()
     from setuptools import setup

 setup(
     setup_requires=['d2to1'],
     d2to1=True
 )

Note that it's important to specify d2to1=True or else the d2to1 functionality
will not be enabled.  It is also possible to set d2to1='some_file.cfg' to
specify the (relative) path of the setup.cfg file to use.  But in general this
functionality should not be necessary.

It should also work fine if additional arguments are passed to `setup()`,
but it should be noted that they will be clobbered by any options in the
setup.cfg file.

Gotchas
=======
 - The requires-dist option in setup.cfg is implemented through the
   distribute/setuptools install_requires option, rather than the broken
   "requires" keyword in normal distutils.
 - The version specifier scheme to be used with "requires-dist" is that used
   by distribute, and not the in the format expected by distutils2.  For
   example, use "d2to1>=0.1" instead of "d2to1 (>0.1)".  This will be fixed in
   a future release.

.. _distutils2 documentation: http://distutils2.notmyidea.org/setupcfg.html
