[Distutils] Provisionally accepting PEP 517's declarative build system interface

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Fri, Jun 2, 2017, at 05:26 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Could you provide a little more detail as to what you would do
> differently in exporting the contents of an sdist that wouldn't apply
> to export a build tree? (aside from skipping emitting PKG-INFO)

When creating an sdist, I query the VCS to work out what files to put in
it. This is brittle - it depends on the directory being a VCS checkout,
and the relevant VCS being available to call. And it's relatively slow,
because we have to shell out to another process. I've decided those are
acceptable trade-offs for the project maintainer making the release.

When exporting a build tree, I would copy only the files that are needed
to make the wheel. This is simple, robust and fast.

I can even generate PKG-INFO when exporting a build tree if that helps.
But I want to keep the idea of a build tree used as an intermediate to
generating a wheel separate from that of an sdist, which is a release
artifact.

Thomas