[Distutils] A possible refactor/streamlining of PEP 517

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Jul 5, 2017 at 9:14 AM, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 5, 2017, at 05:08 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
>> is that flit doesn't handle scenarios like "I unpacked a sdist" or "I
>> downloaded the project archive from github and unpacked that" well.
>
> Flit handles these fine for everything *apart* from making an sdist. It
> can make a wheel, install the package, or symlink it as a development
> install. Hence why I'm so frustrated by the insistence that we must make
> an sdist when we have no need for an sdist.
>
> It's not a compromise I'm entirely happy with, but all the other options
> that we came up with had bigger problems, IMO.

What do you think of the compromise in the draft that I posted at the
beginning of this thread? The idea there is that flit would be
responsible for providing the operations "build an sdist (or say that
it can't)" and "build a wheel", and then if pip tries to build an
sdist and flit tells it that it can't, it's pip's problem to figure
out how it wants to handle that. Of course you'll still probably want
to argue with the pip devs about how they handle this, and whether
they can support in-place builds, etc., but at least those arguments
stop being blockers for PEP 517.

-n

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