On Mon, Jul 10, 2017, at 04:13 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
My apologies folks, this is an entirely irrelevant tangent brought on by my attempting to explain my own preference that source archives (including sdists) actually *be* source archives, containing solely the original software is *its preferred form for modification*.
I also agree with this view - ideally, I think there should be no generated files in an sdist besides the metadata needed for tools consuming it. Many packages have included generated files to simplify building from an sdist, but I see this as a symptom of poor infrastructure which we're gradually fixing. In particular, before we had wheels, installing a package nearly always meant building it, so there was a strong pressure to do part of the build process before distributing the source. I don't think it's practical to forbid generating files to put in the sdist, but for pep517 I'd say it's appropriate to gently discourage it by not providing a build directory to that hook. I'm not going to argue hard for this if other people think the sdist hook needs that parameter, though. Thomas