[Distutils] A possible refactor/streamlining of PEP 517

[Paul Moore]

On 10 July 2017 at 21:28, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> I don't think it's practical to forbid generating files to put in the
> sdist, but for pep517 I'd say it's appropriate to gently discourage it
> by not providing a build directory to that hook. I'm not going to argue
> hard for this if other people think the sdist hook needs that parameter,
> though.

I also don't think it's a huge issue either way (and it's definitely a
tangential issue as far as PEP 517 is concerned) but anecdotally I
have encountered packages that have taken a substantial amount of time
(30 minutes+) to run Cython on the sources[1]. Having pregenerated C
files in the sdist made the difference between "usable" and "not worth
bothering" in that case.

Paul

[1] It may be that was a Cython bug - but that's not actually
relevant, as I didn't know enough to confirm it was a bug, nor did I
know how to avoid triggering it.