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

[Donald Stufft]

On October 2, 2015 at 4:24:38 PM, Daniel Holth (dholth at gmail.com) wrote:
> > We need to embrace partial solutions and the fine folks who propose 
> them so the whole packaging ecosystem can have some progress. 
> PEP 438 may not be a good analogue to adding a new sdist format since 
> the latter only adds new things that you can do. A new sdist format 
> will inconvenience a much more limited set of people, mainly 
> the pip authors and the OS package maintainers.

Packaging formats are a bit like HTTP, "move fast and break things" isn't super
great because anytime you add a new format, you have to support that *forever*
(or long enough to basically be forever). It's unlike a software package where
you can, for example, deprecate and remove something and if someone is still
using that feature they just continue to use an older version of your library. Packagers have no control over what version of the tools people are using and
they are discouraged (or even disallowed) to go back in time and correct their
older packages. Being conservative in what we accept as an accepted standard
and implement in the main tools is a good thing, being liberal in experiments
and what we try and having people try out partial solutions and figure out what
works and what doesn't without making it a standard or putting it in pip is
also a good thing.

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Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA