open() call in setup.py does not work on Windows

[anjos]

The fact that setup.py directly opens the README.md to read does not really work under windows, since the default encoding is not UTF-8 (by default it is CP1252), and that file contains emojis (c.f. conda-forge/staged-recipes#27901).

Would it be possible to port this package to use a more modern version of project setup (e.g. via pyproject.toml). In this case, one wouldn't have to use open at all. You can port your setup.py using hatch for example.