[Distutils] Alternative build system abstraction PEP

[Paul Moore]

On 17 February 2016 at 01:32, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> Finally found the time to sit down and take the various drafts I've sent of
> this to the list before, add a more detailed rationale section, and turn it
> into a pull request:
>
>     https://github.com/pypa/interoperability-peps/pull/63

Comments added inline to the tracker but roughly:

Despite what you say, there's one major difference with Robert's
proposal that you *don't* emphasise, and that is that you explicitly
document a new sdist format. And I don't like the proposed format
because it doesn't offer any option for getting metadata from the
sdist without involving the build backend. While that's no different
from the status quo today, I'm much happier with Robert's approach of
leaving that as "out of scope" and writing the PEP in terms of source
trees that are "a config file and a bunch of stuff that only the build
system needs to care about".

If your proposal and Robert's took the same view of sdists, I'd say we
could toss a coin between them. As it is, I'm inclined to prefer
Robert's proposal, simply because he avoids opening the sdist can of
worms. I sort of like the Python interface over the command line one,
but it's hardly a major distinction.

Paul