[Distutils] Fwd: Re: PEP 517 again

[Paul Moore]

On 24 August 2017 at 16:15, xoviat <xoviat at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2. I'm not completely clear on how pip's implementation will work - I
> think the intention is to always build a sdist and build a wheel from
> that, unless the backend reports it can't build a sdist, in which case
> we ask it to build a wheel directly.
>
> This was the exact process that I proposed, but was told that:
>
>
>> I agree that the way you want to do packaging is fundamentally
>> incompatible
> with build systems that do not resemble distutils. Perhaps since this is
> distutils sig some here are too used to distutils as the only model of how
> packaging might work. Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do
> not become a monster... for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss
> gazes also into you.

That wasn't me that said that.

> There seems to be some miscommunication about the actual process being
> proposed.

Possibly - or there's some confusion about what you're proposing. I
certainly have found your suggestions difficult to follow, and I don't
recall you having said "we do sdist->wheel then fall back to
requesting wheels directly". I also don't see how that's incompatible
with systems that don't resemble distutils, so I suspect that whoever
you quoted (which I think might have been Daniel) understood whatever
you did say to mean something different.

I know Daniel has been involved in the discussion and I don't think
he's raised any such objection about the PEP (and he developed
enscons, so he has direct experience of writing backends).

Paul