On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Marcus Smith
However, the big step you're proposing that I think is fundamentally unsound is that of requiring a wheel be built before dependencies can be queried.
so, Robert, to be clear, you think 3rd party build tools can get the dynamic-dependency support they need just by implementing something dynamic via "setup,py dist-info"? (and it doesn't need to happen literally in the wheel build step?)
Sure -- 'dist-info' would be run in the same environment as bdist_wheel, a few seconds before bdist_wheel was run (unless the output from dist-info convinces us that we need a different version of this package and so we skip running bdist_wheel entirely). So at least in principle, anything bdist_wheel can do/know/figure-out is something that dist-info could also do/know/figure-out. The question about whether to provide a 'dist-info' step is whether the optimization it provides is worth the extra complexity it imposes on build systems and the opportunities for what Donald called "race conditions" (= accidental or intentional skew between the output of dist-info and the actual metadata in the eventual wheel). See also the long email I just sent in its own thread going into more detail on what this trade-off entails :-) -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org