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

[Donald Stufft]

On October 5, 2015 at 12:05:53 PM, Daniel Holth (dholth at gmail.com) wrote:
> sdists work well most of the time. Some problems
> 
> 1 - hard to depend on something setup.py must import
> 2 - hard to use non-distutils build system due to the first problem and a
> poorly defined command line interface
> 3 - have to regenerate metadata to get dependencies
> 
> Assume we are not ever going to be able to remove support for pip install
> git+https:// or the current sdist.
> 
> So you need new-sdist for 3, but could add 1 & 2 within the current
> framework by using an elaborate generic setup.py or by adding a measurable
> amount of complexity to pip. Perhaps the underlying code for 1 & 2 is
> needed to implement features desired in new-sdist.
> 

I'm not opposed to layering things ontop of the current sdist format in the
interim to solve problems that currently exist until a better solution can be
done. That's not what this PEP idea was though, it was creating a whole new
sdist.

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