it's more or less a requirement for asyncio, cf https://docs.sqlalchemy.org/en/14/changelog/migration_14.html#asynchronous-io-support-for-core-and-orm its been debated to make it optional in https://github.com/sqlalchemy/sqlalchemy/issues/6136 but my experience with buildbot was that the daemon didnt start at all if greenlet was not present, and setup.cfg adds the requirement.