distutils
has no functionality for downloading, or even verifying, prerequisites; its install_requires
is only there for documentation.
If you want that, you need the third-party library setuptools
.
Most people already have setuptools
, and hopefully pip
, and will be using them to install your package anyway (assuming you plan to distribute over PyPI), but if you include the setuptools
bootstrap, it will take care of installing setuptools
if needed to install those dependencies.