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

[Donald Stufft]

On October 5, 2015 at 9:25:24 AM, Antoine Pitrou (solipsis at pitrou.net) wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 08:44:04 -0400
> Donald Stufft 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.
> 

I don't think so. Remember in my footnote I mentioned that I wasn't using VCS
to mean literally "something checked into a VCS", but rather the more
traditional (outside of Python) "source release" concept. This could be a
simple tarball that just has the proper, for human consumption, files in it
or it could be a VCS checkout, or it could just be some files sitting on disk.

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