[Distutils] PEP439 and backward compat / easy_install / distlib

[Nick Coghlan]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 6:42 AM, Erik Bray <erik.m.bray at gmail.com> wrote:
> I pretty much agree with you on all of this, but I don't think the
> question should be ignored either--avoiding this question is one of
> the things that got previous packaging reform efforts into trouble.
> Though the agreement to treat "build" and "installation" as two
> different stories mitigates the issue this time around.  In any case
> it's sort of off topic for this thread so I'll bring it up again
> elsewhen.  One thing I see as a possible short-term solution is to
> still rely on some version of distutils as a build tool *only*.  But
> it would still be nice to have some easy way to standardize "in-place"
> installation regardless of how extension modules get built.

That's exactly the interim solution I have in mind: for the moment,
the "archive system" will be "python setup.py sdist" in an appropriate
location and the "build system" will be "python setup.py bdist_wheel".

Both will be modelled on pip's current behaviour when installing from
sdists - the difference will be in the explicit invocation of the
separate steps, rather than handling the whole chain with "setup.py
install".

Longer term I want to make setup.py optional even for source installs,
but that requires further enhancements to the metadata.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia