[Distutils] PEP for specifying build dependencies

[Ian Cordasco]

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 8:24 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 5:39 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
>> Donald, Nathaniel, and I have finished our proposed PEP for specifying a
>> projects' build dependencies. The PEP is being kept at
>> https://github.com/brettcannon/build-deps-pep, so if you find spelling
>> mistakes and grammatical errors please feel free to send a PR to fix them.
>
> Thanks Brett!
>
>> The only open issue in the PEP at the moment is the bikeshedding topic of
>> what to name the sub-section containing the requirements: `[package.build]`
>> or `[package.build-system]` (we couldn't reach consensus among the three of
>> us on this).
>
> To maybe help nudge initial bikeshedding on this in useful directions,
> the main arguments (IIUC) were:
>
> In favor of "build-system": setup.py is used for more than just the
> strict "build" (source tree/sdist -> wheel) phase. For example,
> setup.py is also used to do VCS checkout -> sdist. And it seems likely
> that the new build system abstraction thing will grow similar
> capabilities at some point. So calling the section just "build" might
> be misleading.
>
> In favor of "build": it's just shorter and reads better.
>
> Maybe there's a third option that's even better -- [package.automation] ?
>
> Maybe it doesn't matter that much :-)

I think "build-system" is more descriptive and the more descriptive we
can be, the better. (Think of choosing descriptive method and
attribute names as well as variables.)