On 26 August 2017 at 23:13, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
This whole discussion is about handling a specific case: suppose you have a frontend like pip that when given a source directory and asked to build a wheel, wants to implement that as: - build sdist - unpack sdist - build wheel from unpacked sdist
While I can't speak for Donald or the other pip devs, I'd like to point out that in https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2017-August/031288.html I confirmed that I'm basically persuaded now that pip should just "trust the backend" and use build_wheel directly. So this whole debate isn't relevant for pip. We'll need to wait for other currently-hypothetical frontends like tox or twine which might use the build_wheel hook, before we'll have any practical experience to confirm if there's an issue with "return None" as the way for backends to signal that they weren't able to build a wheel. Paul