questions regarding setup.py code

[am610]

the setup.py code has these following lines, which I want to confirm wether correct:
1.

with open(pth, "r") as fp:
    start = False
    for line in fp.readlines():
        if line.strip() == "dependencies:":
            start = False
        if start:
              ...

The variable start is meant to be a flag that determines when the script should start reading the dependencies from the environment.yml file ? However, it is initialized to False and is never set to True. Additionally, there’s a line that incorrectly sets start back to False when the script encounters the "dependencies:" line, instead of setting it to True. Is this correct ?

2. In the _munge_req function:
   for sym in ["~", "=", "<", ">", ",", "!", "!"]:
   The "!" symbol is listed twice in the list. This is not redundant ?

3. r = line.strip()[3:].strip()
   why this first 3 letters stripping ?

[marcpaterno]

This file has not been updated (except for some formatting tweaks) in several years. We need to clean it up, or perhaps to replace it by using pyproject.toml. For the short term, we will just fix the setup.py. If anyone wants to argue for the use of pyproject.toml, please raise the issue on the #desc-firecrown slack channel.