[Distutils] abstract build system approaches redux

[Paul Moore]

On 15 March 2016 at 18:34, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net> wrote:
> Just to set expectations: this whole process seems stalled to me; I'm
> going to context switch and focus on things that can move forward.
> Someone please ping me when its relevant to put effort in again :).

I'm not sure what is needed to get this process moving again, but when
it does, it would probably be worth reviewing
https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/562

The issue there is that --editable and --target don't work well
together in pip, if I understand the details it's because setuptools
needs extra information to know how to do "setup.py develop" in the
face of --target. The question for this thread is, does the build
system interface need to know what *other* options get passed to pip
as part of deciding what the correct "develop" command should be (or
indeed any of the other commands)?

Note that I don't have any vested interest in the specific issue in
question, and "this is a corner case we shouldn't try to support going
forward" is a perfectly acceptable answer as far as I'm concerned. But
I thought it was worth raising in case it points to a limitation of
the build system command discovery process.

Paul