[Distutils] Towards a simple and standard sdist format that isn't intertwined with distutils

[Donald Stufft]

I'm speaking to the proposal as currently written. It's not completely off base for what I think a solution could be. I think part of the problem though is we don't have all the building blocks figured out and standardized yet. PEP426 has stalled (I plan to pick it up once Warehouse is deployed but someone else could do that) and we should probably get the environment markers sorted out because they are going to be even more important for a static sdist. 

I think that the current proposal conflates a bcs checkout with a sdist too much. As Paul said, sdists are generated and are not generally for human consumption or creation. We should strictly define what it looks like l, but have pluggable build systems. I don't think we need anything more complex than the ability for a sdist to say that it gets built using X hook. Give that hook a standard API and then any tool can be a first class build tool. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 2, 2015, at 4:14 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> That's a fair point. But I don't see any reason Nathaniel's proposal
> *couldn't* be that solution. I'd want to see the sdist format required
> to include static metadata, and the metadata format to be PEP 426, but
> neither of those seem incompatible with the ideas behind the proposal.
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something massive, but I don't see a *huge* gap
> between this proposal and the basic ideas behind the metabuild concept