On Wed, May 31, 2017, at 09:16 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:

How you build the release-quality sdist isn’t really of concern of PEP 517 any more than building a release quality wheel is, it’s up to the build tool to implement that as it makes sense for them.

But if we have a hook for building something called an sdist, we need to define what an sdist is. The definition you're referring to is a functional definition sufficient for a tool that only wants to install it, but it doesn't cover what an sdist means or how it fits into workflows.

I could see this as an argument that the PEP should have *both* a build_sdist and a prepare_build_files hook, if you don’t think that the build_sdist hook is suitable on it’s own.

I would prefer that to the the current status of one hook that tries to cover both use cases.

I'd still rather specify prepare_build_files in this PEP, and leave the sdist hook to a later PEP. I don't see a great need for a standard interface to building an sdist: the developer doing that by calling their build tool directly seems adequate for the majority of use cases.

Thomas