[Distutils] abstract build system approaches redux

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2016 08:44:56 -0500
Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
> 
> I'd like to push back against this, speaking as someone who was originally pro
> CLI:
> 
> I think that a Python API is actually better for one reason: introspection.
> I cannot think of a particularly great way to have a CLI based build tool
> *evolve* with new APIs that are not user facing without requiring end users
> to do something like mark "ok now my thing is X compatible" or without
> inventing some sort of protocol negotiation phase.

I'll add that some build systems may have a non-trivial startup cost
(for example conda-build sets up an isolated environment with
well-defined binaries in it), therefore issuing several CLI commands
can be significantly more costly (and/or difficult to optimize for) than
issuing several API calls from the same single process invocation.

Regards

Antoine.