On Fri, Jul 14, 2017 at 3:32 AM, Thomas Kluyver <thomas@kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
it appears to be non-negotiable that there is some way of building without affecting the source directory, so whatever the interface is, we need some way to do this.
But this is confusing the means with the ends. Obviously no cares about that *per se*; they want it because it accomplishes something they actually care about. Maybe because they don't trust build tools to do incremental builds. Maybe because they want to exercise the sdist path to reduce chances for error. Maybe because pip has always done it that way. What is that thing? What are the advantages of this design, as compared to the fallback of doing unconditional copytree (like pip does now and may well continue doing for years to come regardless of what we say here), or the slightly fancier fallback that my draft supports of attempting to build an sdist and if that fails doing a copytree instead? Is this the simplest way to accomplish the real goal? All the goals that I can think of seem to allow for solutions that have fewer complications and unknowns... ...and if pip's goal is to go via sdist whenever possible while always being careful never to modify the source tree, then why did we end up with a design where sdist generation is the one case that *is* encouraged to modify the source tree? This doesn't make any sense. I'm sorry for dragging this out -- I know you just want to get something finished and stop arguing about this. So do I :-). And your efforts to keep pushing this stone up the hill are much appreciated. I just think we should... find a shorter hill and declare victory over that. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org