breaking compatibility is like nicotin

Just to clarify (in case I didn't adequately communicate it in the article):

Requests isn't a dependency of Setuptools; rather, the *tests* for Setuptools would *try to install* a separate copy of Requests - from source - in a separate environment, for the purpose of testing integration with pip. Setuptools doesn't try to download anything by itself (it asks pip to do so in these tests), so it doesn't have any use for Requests.

In 78.0.1, Requests was removed from the set of example packages used for this kind of integration testing. (As far as I can tell, this was *not* rolled back when the breaking change was rolled back.) The rationale was that already-built versions of Requests already exist; this "build" process is trivial (no code is actually compiled, metadata is just shuffled around); and the overwhelming majority of Requests users will get this pre-built version (you essentially have to request the source version explicitly if you want it, and there's normally no reason to do so for anyone except perhaps Linux distro maintainers).