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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 October 2015 at 18:27, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
>> There are projects on PyPI right now, today, that have no way to
>> generate sdists and will never have any need for "source wheels"
>
> I think I'm as confused by what you're saying here as Donald is. Could
> you give a few examples of such projects? I'd like to go & take a look
> at them and try to understand what they are doing that is so
> incompatible with what Donald and I are thinking of as a"source
> wheel".

An example would be flit itself:
  https://github.com/takluyver/flit
  https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flit

It's not that you couldn't support a "source wheel" here, it's just
that forcing them to go checkout -> source wheel -> wheel would be
adding pointless hassle while accomplishing nothing useful. pip would
never actually touch the source wheel, and for the remaining use cases
for source distribution, a classic "source release" that's basically a
tarball of a VCS checkout + static version number would be more
familiar and useful.

-n

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