We've spent a huge amount of effort on reaching the point where pretty
much everything *can* be made pip installable. Heck, *PyQt5*, which is
my personal benchmark for a probably-totally-unpackageable package,
announced last week that they now have binary wheels on pypi for all
of Win/Mac/Linux:

that's thanks to binary wheels being a simple archive -- by definition, if you can build and install it *somehow* you can make a binary wheel out of it -- which is a great thing -- so nice to have wheel completely independent of the build system.

isn't that where we are trying to go -- have pip be independent of the build system?

> If the BDFL delegate makes a call - fine. I read
> Nick's earlier email in the thread as such a thing TBH :).

Oh sure, I think everyone agrees that the file format choice is not a
make-or-break decision

Am I the only one that thinks we're conflating two things here? choice of file format is separate from "use setup.cfg" -- I think we should use something NEW -- rather than try to patch on top of existing setup.cfg files -- that way we're free to change the rules, and no one (and no tools) will be confused about what version of what system is in play.

In short -- we should do something new, not just extend setup.cfg, and not because we want a new file format.

-CHB

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

Emergency Response Division
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Chris.Barker@noaa.gov