[Distutils] A possible refactor/streamlining of PEP 517

[Steve Dower]

One nice thing about providing a “put your work in this directory” setting for all tasks is that only the front end has to know how and where to create it, and how and when to clean it up later. Users may want to configure this across all projects, regardless of the backend in use.

Permitting this directory to be the source tree implicitly requires backends to support “in place” builds (i.e. you should put output files in a matching structure under that directory in case it really is the source tree). In this case, front ends need to be responsible for (not) running rmtree and backends should not blindly delete everything (or else they’ll get bug reports from very upset users).

Cheers,
Steve

Top-posted from my Windows phone at EuroPython

From: Thomas Kluyver
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2017 9:14
To: distutils-sig at python.org
Subject: Re: [Distutils] A possible refactor/streamlining of PEP 517

On Mon, Jul 10, 2017, at 07:01 AM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> So I think we have pretty solid evidence that the reason the
> procedural "build directory preparation" hook wasn't sitting well with
> people was because that isn't the way build systems typically model
> the concept, while a "build directory" setting is very common (even if
> that "setting" is "the current working directory when configuring or
> running the build").

Hooray! :-)

Do we want to also provide a build_directory for the build_sdist hook?
In principle, I don't think making an sdist should involve a build step,
but I know that some projects do perform steps like cython code gen or
JS minification before making the sdist. I think this was a workaround
to ease installation before wheel support was widespread, and I'd be
inclined to discourage it now, so my preference would be no
build_directory parameter for build_sdist. Backends which insist on
generating intermediates at that point can make a temp dir themselves.

Then I guess that the choice between building a wheel directly and
attempting to build an sdist first (with direct fallback) is one for
frontends, and doesn't need to be specified.

Thomas
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