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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 2:36 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 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).

Right: this is why it's important for me to make the case that putting
full PEP 426 metadata in sdists is not just temporarily inconvenient,
but actually conceptually the wrong thing to do.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org