To improve the story around doing programmatic changes to all our repositories, it would be nice if our setuptools metadata was stored in a machine readable format, rather than in code in setup.py. This would also help (a lot) to generate Debian packaging from repositories.

After a cursory look at all our setup.py files, the only thing that needs to change is the pervasive use of requirements*.txt files. We're using them in a way that's discouraged by the Python packaging best practices, so it'd kill two birds with one stone.

This is something that we should replace with:

• extra requires (which we're already generating)
• making sure we use these extra requires everywhere (notably, in tox, by using the extras config instead of deps = -r foo.txt or deps = .[extra]).

The only use of requirements.txt left is py-depgraph in swh-environment, but this would be as happy (or even happier) parsing a setup.cfg file (e.g. with crudini).