proposal: reinstate editable installs on ansible-lint

During the last year the setup.py was silently removed from ansible-lint project. This had a side-effect that made impossible to perform editable installs of the project, something that works very fine with other ansible projects.

Editable installs are essential for anyone that does development and contributions. Without -e mode, making changes to a python library becomes a serious inconvenience. Developer has to repackage and reinstall the library before running any code again. Even debugging becomes a stuggle as you often discover that the code you run is not the one you modified.

ansible-lint is the first python package I encountered that removed setup.py. The deprecation of setup.py is planned by PEP-518 but effective removal of the file was a long-term plan.

As a community project, ansible-lint needs to ease contributions from developers, not introducing additional contribution barriers. I am more than willing to help with the additional maintenance needed for keeping the editable mode working.

I was told that the original decision was made after an unrecorded discussion made on irc (outside of a meeting). Due to this, I want to reopen the subject and give opportunity to gather feedback from users and developers, especially those that made or wanted to contribute to ansible-lint in the past.

Should we reinstate editable installs with ansible-lint?

/polls yes no "not sure"