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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Oct 5, 2015 at 6:51 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
[...]
> 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. The end goal in my mind is someone produces a source wheel and uploads that to PyPI and PyPI takes it from there.  Mucking around with manually producing binary wheels or producing source releases other than what's checked into vcs will be something that I suspect only advanced users will do.

Of course people will make source releases, and should be able to
upload them to PyPI. The end goal is that *pip* will not use source
releases, but PyPI is not just there for pip. If it was, it wouldn't
even show package descriptions :-).

There are projects on PyPI right now, today, that have no way to
generate sdists and will never have any need for "source wheels"
(because they don't use distutils and they build "none-any" wheels
directly from their source). It should still be possible for them to
upload source releases for all the other reasons that having source
releases is useful: they form a permanent record of the whole project
state (including potentially docs, tests, working notes, etc. that
don't make it into the wheels), human users may well want to download
those archives, Debian may prefer to use that as their orig.tar.gz,
etc. etc.

And on the other end of the complexity scale, there are projects like
numpy where it's not clear to me whether they'll ever be able to
support "source wheels", and even if they do they'll still need source
releases to support user configuration at build time.

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org