[Distutils] build system abstraction PEP

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 11:01 PM, Robert Collins
<robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> Since Nathaniel seems busy, I've taken the liberty of drafting a
> narrow PEP based on the conversations that arose from the prior
> discussion.
>
> It (naturally) has my unique flavor, but builds on the work Nathaniel
> had put together, so I've put his name as a co-author even though he
> hasn't seen a word of it until now :) - all errors and mistakes are
> therefore mine...
>
> Current draft text in rendered form at:
> https://gist.github.com/rbtcollins/666c12aec869237f7cf7
>
> I've run it past Donald and he has a number of concerns - I think
> we'll need to discuss them here, and possibly in another hangout, to
> get a path forward.

Now that I've had a chance to read it properly...

First impression: there's surprisingly little overlap between this and
my simultaneously-posted draft [1] -- my draft focuses on trying to
only document the stuff that everyone seemed to agree on, includes a
proposal for static metadata in sdists (since Donald seemed to be
saying that he considered this a mandatory component of any proposal
to update how sdists work), and tries to set out a blueprint for how
to organize the remaining issues, whereas yours spends most of its
time on the controversial details that I decided to skip over for this
draft.

Being an engineer, there are a number of these details that I'm
tempted to quibble over :-), but I will restrain myself for now and
wait first to see how the other thread develops and whether we do have
general agreement on the points I wrote, since this seems like a
complex enough topic that it could easily spiral become a
conversational morass if we aren't careful to keep the different
issues organized?

-n

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2015-October/027360.html

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