[Distutils] status check on PEP 517

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 3:22 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20 July 2017 at 10:46, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>> To make this concrete: I'm *pretty* sure (?) that at this point all
>> the basic elements in my "simplified" rewrite are things that we now
>> have consensus are needed in some form, so maybe we can use that as a
>> kind of "minimal core" reference point:
>>
>>   https://github.com/njsmith/peps/commits/517-refactor-streamline/pep-0517.txt
>
> I don't have time this week to look at this, sorry, but a couple of points:
>
> 1) This links to a commit in your repo, not to the actual document.

Ugh, sorry! Pasted the wrong link. This is the correct one:

    https://github.com/njsmith/peps/blob/517-refactor-streamline/pep-0517.txt

> Also, I'd *really* prefer a rendered version if I'm going to review
> this.

Annoyingly, the PEPs repo uses a .txt extension for .rst files, thus
cleverly preventing github from doing anything useful by default...

Here's a rendered version pasted into a gist:

    https://gist.github.com/njsmith/8eee7cecdd7e02fef5e4e9bb589877c9

Not sure it's any more readable, but there it is :-)

> However,
> 2) I'd much rather if we're going for a "stop and take stock" style of
> reset, that we base that off what's currently in the official version
> of the PEP. Trying to read a new document and identify the differences
> from the working version is both time consuming and error prone. I
> don't think there's any reason that any of your questions wouldn't
> just as reasonably apply to the official version of the PEP.

My impression is that people are going to have to pretty much read
from scratch anyway, because the official version is kind of in a
messy state right now. It's had a number of changes merged recently,
it has more changes pending in a PR, it's missing features that
everyone agrees are needed (NotImplementedError), and it's in a
confusing shape because of how it's grown organically over the last
~1.5 years, while my draft is cleaned up into some rational structure.
And even if we eventually want to stick with the version in the PEPs
repository, then IMO it's probably more useful to look at a minimal
thing and ask "what is this missing?" than to look at something with
extra stuff added and ask "what can we take away?".

(Also, of course, I secretly believe that if everyone looked at my
draft they'd go "huh, actually, this has everything I care about, I
would be totally fine with this". I could be wrong! But it would be
very nice to *know* one way or the other instead of just continuing
the cycle of Nick and I yelling at each other about what we think
other people want.)

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org