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

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 12 October 2015 at 05:37, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net>
wrote:

> And a bugfix :) - I didn't link to the docs for the build system
> interface we have today -
> https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/reference/pip_install/#build-system-interface
>

I'm happy to see that the command line interface pip requires from setup.py
is now documented. But the first thing it describes is the egg_info
command, and the description of what that involves is basically 'whatever
setuptools does'. Egg info is not any kind of standard, AFAIK - unlike dist
info. One of my main goals in writing flit is to build wheels without
involving setuptools at all, so I'm probably never going to implement that.

I also don't want to have a setup.py in the VCS at all, because it's an
invitation for people to run setup.py whatever, and then file bug reports
that it doesn't do exactly what setuptools/distutils would do.

This is what I like about Nathaniel's proposal. By looking for a new file,
it clearly indicates that this is a new style Python source tree, without
potential confusion over what setup.py does, and it lets us specify a
simple build system interface based on standardised pieces like wheels
rather than messing around with the details of setuptools.

Thomas
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