[Distutils] abstract build system PEP update

[Paul Moore]

On 18 February 2016 at 13:48, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yes, twine is a good, concrete example.
>
> I believe tools like pyp2rpm, conda skeleton, py2dsc and fpm also rely on
> that static sdist metadata (I'm not 100% sure on that, but it would make
> sense for them to do so).

Yeah, I'm sure there are a lot of tools out there that use the sdist
metadata. In a lot of ways, pip is an extremely atypical example of a
sdist consumer.

> We just spend so much time worrying about the dependency management problems
> that PKG-INFO *doesn't* handle that we forget the simpler descriptive
> metadata that it covers accurately :)

Indeed - and by focusing solely on pip's requirements in many ways
we're designing for an edge case (admittedly a hugely significant and
by far the most used edge case, but even so...) :-)

Paul