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

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> 1) what in the world is a "source wheel"? And how is it different than an
> sdist (other than maybe in a different file format.

It seemed like people had different ideas about what a platonic
"sdist" even is and this was causing us to talk past each other. So I
proposed the terms "source release" and "source wheel" as two somewhat
abstract concepts to let us to state positions like "I think an sdist
should fill the role of a source wheel, and that there's no need for
source releases", or "I think source wheels and source releases are
different and important, so we need one spec for each". I'm not sure
how much it helped :-)

This is the email that suggested distinguishing between the terms:
  https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2015-October/026981.html
and the "source wheel" term in particular was stolen from Donald's
earlier email:
  https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2015-October/026964.html

-n

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