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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Oct 3, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> On October 2, 2015 at 10:27:36 PM, Nathaniel Smith (njs at pobox.com) wrote:
>>
>> So I'm extremely reluctant to give up on standardizing how to handle
>> VCS checkouts. And if we're going to have a standard for that, then
>> would sure be nice if we could share the work between this standard
>> and the one for sdists, given how similar they are.
>
> Mentioned in another email, but I don't think we should give up on the VCS
> handling, I just think we should defer it to another PEP. I think this
PEP is
> suffering from trying to use the same mechanism for VCS and sdists when
they
> are different things and have different considerations. The Python
packaging
> toolchain has a long history of suffering because it tried to reuse the
same
> thing across multiple "phases" of the packaging life cycle. The problem
with
> that is different phases have different needs, and when you're trying to
use
> the same thing across multiple you suffer from something that is a sort of
> "Jack of All Trades, Master of None" kind of thing.

I guess to make progress in this conversation I need some more detailed
explanations. I totally get that there's a long history of thought and
conversations behind the various assertions here like "a sdist is
fundamentally different from a VCS checkout", "there must be a 1-1 mapping
between sdists and wheels", "pip needs sdists that have full wheel metadata
in static form", and I'm barging in from the outside with no context, but I
literally have no idea why the specific design features you're asking for
are desirable or even viable. Right now if I were to try and write the PEP
you're asking for, then the rationale section would just be "because Donald
said so" over and over :-). I couldn't write the motivation section,
because I don't know any problems that the PEP you're describing would fix
for me as a package author (which doesn't mean they don't exist, but!).

-n
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