This issue is part of #1650.

smart_install_lib is currently used to tag Git versions. As distutils' install_lib has no replacement in setuptools, smart_install_lib has to be replaced with something else. Possible options:

• Make use of dynamic metadata which is capable of deriving the current project version directly from git, using setuptools-scm build backend plugin. It would look like the following in pyproject.toml:

[build-system]
requires = ["setuptools>=64", "setuptools_scm>=8"]
build-backend = "setuptools.build_meta"

[tool.setuptools_scm]
version_file = "ivre/VERSION"

Out of the box, default versioning scheme is the following vs current versioning scheme is the following if I'm not mistaken:

• 1.2.3 when we have a Git tag
• 1.2.3.devN when we have N revisions on top of 1.2.3 tag

We might be able to get the same versioning by settingsetuptools_scm.local_scheme to no-local-version.

Worst case scenario, we could use vendored copy and import install_data from setuptools._distutils.command.install_lib to buy time, however it will be an issue when we'll want to completely migrate from setup.py to pyproject.toml.