Thanks for working on this, PJE.

I'm working on a patch to submit to Nevow, but it looks like this might
necessitate a change to the Epsilon release management tool, which is also used
by many other Divmod projects, so it might be hard to get this patch accepted. 
My patch has a higher chance of being accepted if I can explain why it is a bad
idea for a project to import its dependencies during setup.py execution, even
when using distutils.  Can you explain why that is a bad idea or point to some
best-practices doc which warns against it?

Thanks.