On 2017-07-05 12:40:08 -0400 (-0400), Donald Stufft wrote: [...]
That doesn’t solve the “I downloaded a archive from GitHub” or “I mounted my VCS checkout into a docker container without my VCS installed”, but those can only be solved by the backend tool itself and IMO it’s perfectly acceptable for the backend to fail with an appropriate error message if it needs something that the current directory or environment doesn’t provide.
That's exactly the approach PBR has taken since the beginning, and it's worked just fine. Users do still wrongly assume from time to time that they should be able to treat a "GitHub tarball" or similar contextless pile of files like an sdist even if it hasn't been correctly passed through the sdist build process first, but a combination of sane fallback behaviors, environment variable overrides and clear error messages keeps the invalid bug reports to a manageable minimum. -- Jeremy Stanley