[Distutils] Future of setuptools and buildout

[Nick Coghlan]

On 20 August 2016 at 02:46, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> Maybe the alternative to setuptools_lite is to set up one of these other
> tools to work well (easily) for building python packages. If it can do
> everything that setuptools can do (that we want setuptools to do), and just
> as easily, maybe that's the next step forward.
>
> but if that isn't happening soon, then a setuptools_lite would be a useful
> step forward.

Enabling folks to more easily use existing build systems like Scons,
Waf, Meson, CMake, et al is one of the main goals of pyproject.toml.

Daniel Holth has a working Scons proof of concept at
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/enscons that actually works independently
of pyproject.toml support in pip by using a boilerplate setup.py to do
the bootstrapping and invocation of the build system.

It's why we don't particularly want to replace distutils/setuptools
with any build system in particular - the world actually has a surfeit
of cross-platform build systems, and many of them are written in
Python and are hence quite friendly to being bootstrapped for use in
building Python extension modules.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia