[Distutils] A possible refactor/streamlining of PEP 517

[Jeremy Stanley]

On 2017-07-10 20:33:16 +1000 (+1000), Nick Coghlan wrote:
[...]
> we don't really *want* folks to be adding generated files to their
> sdist that they aren't keeping under source control - we'd prefer
> that such activities were postponed to "build_wheel" now that we
> have separate source and precompiled distribution formats.
[...]

This is a mildly naive view. The software I'm familiar with is
actually attempting to reflect metadata _from_ the source revision
control _into_ the sdist because while it's "tracked" there it's not
tracked as normal files (version information from tags, change logs
from the commit history, contributor lists from commit authorship).
The metadata in question is lost by just blindly tarring up tracked
files, so needs some mechanism to export and inject as untracked
files (from the source revision control perspective) for inclusion
in the sdist.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley