[Distutils] PEP for specifying build dependencies

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Wed, May 11, 2016 at 7:22 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
[...]
> Now, you could argue that the [package] keyword is superfluous and in
> reality it’s highly unlikely that we ever get anything major that would ever
> sit as a sibling to it (besides tool) and thus it doesn’t make sense to pay
> the cost of those extra 8 characters when it is probably going to be the
> only non-tool value ever. Personally I think hedging our bets and leaving
> the door open for that possibility is a nice thing to do when the cost is so
> low. However, I don’t think it’d be unreasonable or silly to make the other
> trade off and just say that having it isn’t valuable and just stick
> [build-system] at the top level along with [tool.*] and say that if we ever
> come up with something that is not related to a package (in the PyPA sense)
> that it really won’t be that big of a deal to just have it live beside stuff
> like [build-system].
>
> So I think we should either have:
>
> [package.build-system]
> requires = [“setuptools”, “wheel”]
>
> [tool.flake8]
> …
>
> OR
>
> [build-system]
> requires = [“setuptools”, “wheel”]
>
> [tool.flake8]
> …
>
> but I don’t think trying to make the parsed tree fit some “correct”
> hierarchy of data types when you consider the [tool] section (which really
> only exists to prevent collisions, otherwise we’d just let people stick
> [flake8] etc at the top level) is worth it.

FTR, to the extent that I object to [package] it's nothing to do with
character count and purity, and instead to do with it being a bit
confusing / poor UI, because as we've seen no-one's really sure what a
"package" is. It's not a huge deal, but it might create some user
confusion and future-PEP-author confusion.

My preference ordering:

[common.build-system] = [build-system] > [package.build-system] > nothing

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org