Problem

Specifically for my use-case, I'm trying to remove setuptools from my application dependencies (so I can use pip-tools with pip install --no-deps, as per pip's recommendation)

Suggested solution

Remove setuptools requirement from install_requires

Alternative solutions

For my use, use pip-tools --allow-unsafe, or pip install without --no-deps, but this doesn't solve the underlying issue

Additional context

Setuptools is only used in the google-api-core package during build-time (as the legacy build backend), and not during runtime (a repository search confirms this)

Related issues:

• Setuptools as dependency is problematic w/ pip-tools google-auth-library-python#595 (resolved by chore: drop 'setuptools' dependency google-auth-library-python#913)
• setuptools 60.0.0 breaking change #325