[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 18 July 2013 13:13, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 18 Jul 2013 21:48, "Oscar Benjamin" <oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> In another thread you mentioned the idea that someone would build
>> without using distutils/setuptools by using a setup.py that simply
>> invokes an alternate build system that is build-required by the sdist.
>> That's fine for simple cases but how many 'python setup.py <command>'s
>> should the setup.py support?
>
> Please read PEP 426, as I cover this in detail. If anything needs further
> clarification, please let me know.

Okay, I have actually read that before but I forgot about that bit. It says:
'''
In the meantime, the above operations will be handled through the
distutils/setuptools command system:
python setup.py dist_info
python setup.py sdist
python setup.py build_ext --inplace
python setup.py test
python setup.py bdist_wheel
'''

That seems a sufficiently minimal set of commands. What I wonder when
reading it is whether any other command line options are expected to
be supported. For example if the setup.py is using
distutils/setuptools then you could do something like:

   python setup.py sdist --dist-dir=some_dir

Should it be explicitly not required that the setup.py should support
any other invocation than those listed and should just report
success/failure by error code?

Also in the event of failure is it the job of setup.py to clean up
after itself (since there's no clean command)?


Oscar