It's not crazy at all. You use requirements.txt to keep a track of the dependencies needed for development, and you put the dependencies needed to build and in

It's not crazy at all. You use requirements.txt to keep a track of the dependencies needed for development, and you put the dependencies needed to build and install a package into setup.py where the packaging script can get it. These are two different things, because they do two different jobs. It's really very simple.