[Distutils] Fwd: Re: PEP 517 again

[Paul Moore]

On 24 August 2017 at 20:00, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> So for the time being, I'd prefer to say that the build_wheel() hook should
> not create or modify files in the source directory. Backends may keep their
> own caches elsewhere to speed up repeated builds, but any more provisions
> for developer use cases should be left for a future PEP. And developers can
> invoke enscons/flit/... directly in the meantime.

That means a PEP 517 compatible interface to setuptools is more
complex, as it would *have* to specify a temporary build directory.
And I'm not sure whether there are any *other* files it dumps in the
source directory (egg info comes to mind, and PKG-INFO) and if so
whether it's easy to get setuptools to place them elsewhere. That's
fine, as far as I'm concerned, but it should be made explicit, IMO.
I'm not yet sure who (if anyone) is proposing to write a PEP 517
wrapper for setuptools (or if we'll need to special-case setuptools in
pip for "legacy" support) but we should make it as easy as possible
for anyone who does to get the details right, as it's likely to be a
very widely used backend.

It would be a lot easier to handle the edge cases here if there were
someone writing a setuptools wrapper. Any takers? (I'm not sure I can
make the time to do so, and I *am* sure that if I did, I don't have
the time to support and maintain it going forward...)

Paul