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

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 09:51:05 -0400
Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> You can see these needs are different I think by looking at how what Nathaniel wants differs from what me and Paul want. He wants something that will make the human side easier and will support different tools, we want something that pip can consume more reasonably. Trying to do too much with a singular format just means it sucks for all the uses cases instead of being great for one use case. 

That doesn't seem to follow. You can have regular human-compatible
content and a few machine-compatible files besides (perhaps in a
dedicated subdirectory). I don't see how that "sucks".

> I also don't think it will be confusing. They'll associate the VCS thing (a source release) as something focused on development for most everyone. Most people won't explicitly make one and nobody will be uploading it to PyPI.

Well, what is the point of standardizing the concept of source releases
if nobody produces them?

Regards

Antoine.