On 31 May 2017 at 20:20, Donald Stufft
The most likely outcome if PEP 517 is implemented as defined and people who aren’t steeped in packaging lore hear about is, is they get excited about being able to kill setup.py, they implement it, they find out some tool they depend on doesn’t work and can’t work with it, they get discouraged and start filling issues. Ideally those issues are filed on the tool that implemented PEP 517, but most likely it will be filed on tox, Travis, GemFury, etc.
I am struggling to figure out where there is opposition to simply exposing something in a standard way, that you were already planning on implementing anyways.
There's a lot of baggage associated with the term sdist. As a suggestion - if backends supplied a prepare_build_files hook, someone could write a pretty trivial tool that called that hook. Then call the build_wheel_metadata hook to get some details to put into PKG-INFO, zip the result up and call it a sdist. You could dump a setup.py replacement in there that used PEP 517 hooks to implement the setup.py interface, if you wanted. Given how vaguely defined a sdist is, it would be hard to argue that the result is *not* a sdist. I'm not sure how much further you're going to insist on going. You no longer create a sdist using "setup.py sdist", sure. But at some point the tools have to deal with setup.py going away, so I don't see how that's a requirement forever. If you really think we need to cover these use cases solidly (and you have a point, I'm not saying they are irrelevant at all) then maybe we need to get input from the tox/travis/gemfury devs, to see what they actually think, rather than trying to guess their requirements? Paul PS None of this means I am in any way in favour of making it seem like we're OK with projects not providing sdists (in some form or other). We're an open source community, and I think publishing sources alongside your binaries, is key to that. A link to an external source code repository isn't sufficient, IMO (the repo could die, like Google code did).