On Mon, Jul 17, 2017, at 01:07 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
If we have a consensus here that "build a sdist and build a wheel from it" is an acceptable/viable main route for pip to generate wheels (with "just ask the backend" as fallback) then I'm OK with not bothering with an "ask the backend to build a wheel out of tree" option. My recollection of the history was that there was some resistance in the past to pip going down the "build via sdist" route, but if that's now considered OK in this forum, then I'm fine with assuming that either I was mistaken or things have changed.
I think I was one of the people arguing against going via an sdist. The important point for me is that an sdist is not a requirement for installing from source - it's ok by me if it tries building an sdist first and then falls back to building a wheel directly. Since flit generates no intermediate artifacts, though, it's not an informative data point for where they should be placed. Thomas