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

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 08:44:04 -0400
Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> I don't think that it makes sense for pip to go directly from a VCS[1] to a
> Wheel in the grand scheme of things. Right now we kind of do it, but that's
> because we just treat them like an unpacked sdist [2], long term though I don't
> think that is the correct way to do things. We (I?) want to minimize the
> different installation "paths" that can be taken and the main variable then
> when you do a ``pip install`` is how far long that path we already are. My
> ideal path looks something like this:
> 
>     VCS -> Source Wheel [3] -> Wheel -> Installed
>     \-> Inplace Installation [4]

A valid use case may be to do an in-place installation from a sdist
(although you may question the sanity of doing development from a
source tree which isn't VCS-backed :-)).

In any case, sdists being apt for human consumption is an important
feature IMHO.

Regards

Antoine.