So I totally forgot to reply here. Thank you for the ping, jooola
I don't agree with the preposition. The statement, Funkwhales setup is too hard and has too many steps and need to be fixed isn't really true - use docker and its easy enough. If you rely on bare metal installations, use the quick install. So for the users those many steps are usually not required at all.
Nevertheless, it would simplify our code in several places if we could simply use a pypi package. I agree to all other benefits as well.
I also agree with the fact this might be a long road to go until we can reach it. At first, we are in the middle of the release preparations for 1.3.0, which basically consumes all team members time right now. So this is pretty low priority right now from my point of view, but if someone wants to lead the efforts, I am here for support.
Regarding the configuration I don't think its much of a problem. When we ship Funkwhale in Docker, which is probably the mainly used deployment out there, all configuration is done via environment variables and read by the django config module. All important settings are already "exposed" this way and its pretty easy to add more of them, if needed.
The bigger issue from my point of view is to move code or configs inside the repository, since its hard to keep track of all side effects. This needs proper planning, break the process down into several steps, execute one, test, repeat.
Maybe @JuniorJPDJ has some clever thoughts on this as well