hmm I think easier to simply eliminate the need for pkg_resources - not sure why this is in their in the first place

cc @jacobschaer

can u just do gflags.version (or similar)?

cc @jacobschaer ?

@jreback I seem to recall Google was doing something weird with their version strings before. I'd have to look to see if that's still the case. Isn't setuptools a requirement for pandas anyways? @sean-schaefer

@jacobschaer setuptools is only a requirement of building from source. not a run-time (on windows).

Any way to eliminate its usage (e.g. using LooseVersion)?

@jacobschaer ?

Was looking into this - I'm having some account issues with GBQ for integration testing, but it looks like using:

if LooseVersion(apiclient.__version__ >= '1.2.0'):

works. However, that's only part of the google-api-python-client package. As for gflags, a quick look shows no easy way to identify it's version programatically. However, in light of #8327, it may no longer be needed...

@jacobschaer

I don't mind that setup tools is require for gbq
just don't want it necessary on main importing of pandas
can u move this detection so that it would fail w/ o setuptools ?
and then add setuptools to install.rst

@jacobschaer status?

During testing, I exceed a rate limiter in BQ (my bad - had two tests running at once on accident). I'll re-run the integration test later. I haven't tried removing setuptools from the virtual enviroment, but I can't see why this wouldn't work. #8409

Integration test finally passed locally. Still need to validate that it actually solved the problem... anyone want to try it? :D

closing in favor of #8409