[Distutils] PEP 517 again

[Paul Moore]

On 29 August 2017 at 01:13, Chris Barker <chris.barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 12:50 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Me too. At the moment, I only expect two backends of any substance -
>> your flit backend and xoviat's setuptools one. But I only know of one
>> frontend, namely pip - and talk of projects like tox or twine acting
>> as frontends never seems to get any traction.
>
>
> If the build API is clean and supported enough, I can see conda using it.
>
> just sayin'

Thanks - that's really good to know. So *is* the build API clean
enough for you? Specifically:

1. build_sdist can be missing, or can report back (somehow) that it
failed to produce a sdist, and you should fall back to build_wheel.
2. build_wheel must always succeed and must always exist.
3. All hooks must be run in a separate subprocess

There's also error handling, which I don't recall the details of, but
I think boils down to the backend code can write what it likes to
stdout/stderr and may raise an exception indicating "something blew
up".

Those are basically the key points at the moment. Add to that, does
conda mind if build_wheel might result in a different wheel than
build_sdist->build_wheel would produce?

Paul