I have found a bit more time to work on my PEP 517 consumer API: https://github.com/takluyver/pep517 It provides two main interfaces: - 'pep517.wrappers' is a lower-level interface to call the backend hooks in a subprocess. - 'pep517.envbuild' is a higher-level interface which creates a temporary environment, uses pip to install build dependencies, and builds a wheel or an sdist. I hope that some frontend tools will be able to use these interfaces directly, but I also intend it as a reference consumer which backend authors can use to test their implementation. As such, I'd like to propose moving the project into the control of the Python Packagaing Authority - i.e. transferring the Github repo and giving other people upload rights on PyPI. In other news, Flit 0.12 is out, providing a PEP 517 backend. Though come to think of it, I may have forgotten to use the tar pax format. Thomas