On 22 March 2014 22:37, Vinay Sajip
1. Formally decouple the setup.py CLI from the distutils command system
Agreed - it looks like a compatible CLI needs to be part of the transition to any new system (I assume that's what you meant).
Does this statement mean "document the exact setup.py invocations which need to be supported by any tool" or does it mean "create a new standard cli and update pip to use it and sort out a means of wrapping existing setup.py scripts to expose it"? If the former, then I've informally done that earlier in the thread (basically "setup.py bdist_wheel -d XXX" is it[1], if we assume that by the time it's official pip will have completed the move to installing from sdist by using wheels as an intermediate step). Writing a wrapper setup.py that simply invokes a different tool such as bento is trivial. Paul [1] The one exception is editable installations (setup.py develop). That's supported by pip, implemented wholly in setuptools, and an integral part of many workflows. I don't believe anyone has looked yet at what might be needed to decouple that from the distutils/setuptools/setup.py infrastructure.