[Distutils] build system abstraction PEP, take #2

[Donald Stufft]

> On Nov 17, 2015, at 9:27 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> There are a number of separate subcommands that build systems must support.
> 
> I wonder how desirable and viable this all is. Desirable, because you
> are still asking the build system to appear as setuptools *in some way*.
> Viable, because pip may some day need to ask more from setuptools and
> then third-party build tools will have to adapt and implement said
> command-line options, defeating the "abstraction".
> 
> In other words, this PEP seems to be only solving a fraction of the
> problem.

Can you explain this? I don’t see how it’s true. We need some way for pip
to invoke the build system no matter what the build system is. Either that
API is a Python API or that build system is a CLI based API but either way
there needs to be some way for that to happen. This PEP chooses (at my
request) a defined CLI API because it makes the delineation between build
system and pip cleaner.

The whole point of this PEP is that once we have it, we can’t just randomly
require more from the build tool than what is in the interface defined in
this PEP. If we need more than we have to write a new PEP that extends the
old interface with a new feature, but at all times it is built on an
interface that is standardized via a PEP.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 842 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/attachments/20151117/bf7d1d0a/attachment.sig>