Summary

matplotlib does pull in setuptools as a runtime dependency.

if setuptools is installed it uses the pkg_resources to look for resources.

Is this on purpose? The code in the setup.py apears to me to mean that the dependency should not be a dependency for production packages, or am i wrong?

I would like to get rid of this dependency.

Proposed fix

If possible the nicest solution would be to just drop the dependency.

I am unsure if there is really a use case for setuptools_scm at runtime (as opposed to setup time).

Thansk for the great work!