[Distutils] PEP 517 again

[xoviat]

 > I don't agree that exceptions are the way to do "things"
in general. They're the way to so *some* things. The question
is whether the thing we're talking about is one of those
things.

I mean how is opening a file different than attempting to build an sdist?
open() could return true or false and not raise any exception. But it
doesn't. If you can't open the file, you get an exception. It's the same
idea except here we are asking for an sdist. We would greatly prefer to
have one. And if we don't have one, then we have to do something else to
handle the error.

This *is* Python. Sure, it may not be a good idea, though I think it's nice
most of the time. It may not even be accepted for this PEP. But, although I
don't have a strong opinion about whether it *should* be in the PEP, I do
have a strong opinion about whether it would be an exception to the norms
of Python, and my opinion is that it would. The fact that Nick, who I think
is the only core developer here, immediately jumped on this issue confirms
my suspicions here.

2017-08-25 20:00 GMT-05:00 Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>:

> xoviat wrote:
>
>> I agree with Nick that exceptions are the way to do things in Python
>>
>
> I don't agree that exceptions are the way to do "things"
> in general. They're the way to so *some* things. The question
> is whether the thing we're talking about is one of those
> things.
>
> The reasoning behind this is that Python has in general adopted this
>> approach (Nick is right that they would have used NotImplementedError for
>> binary operations except for performance issues)
>>
>
> But only because NotImplemented is an out-of-band condition
> for operations in general. We're not talking about a general
> operation here, but a very specific one that only has a couple
> of possible results.
>
> --
> Greg
>
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