[Distutils] mebs, the meta-build system

[Daniel Holth]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 5:21 PM, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 11:25 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> An installer downloads an sdist. For each installed build plugin,
>> .recognize(dir) is called. The first plugin to return True is used.
>
> Why not just have a standard bit of metadata in an sdist that tells
> the installer what builder(s) needs to be installed?  i.e., the
> equivalent of setup_requires on steroids.
>
> (Granted, for backward compatibility, it's not hard to recognize
> setuptools, distribute, or distutils-based sdists.)

* not an actual project *

In practice you would have a tiny standard bit of metadata
"setup_requires on steroids" and you would almost always follow it,
but the ordered-list-of-builders design lets you override the sdist's
decision.