[Distutils] A possible refactor/streamlining of PEP 517

[Paul Moore]

On 15 July 2017 at 09:16, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> There's one thing called an "in place build", like `setup.py build -i`,
> where the idea is to convert the working source tree itself into something
> you can put on your python path. It's related to doing "development" or
> "editable" installs like `setup.py develop` or `pip install -e`. As far as I
> know, absolutely everyone is happy to defer all discussion of this to a
> future PEP.

Or more likely, that's something that should be completely managed by
the backend, and frontends like pip don't offer any sort of interface
to it. But as you say, a discussion for another time.

> And then there's another thing called an "in place build", as opposed to an
> "out of place" build. In this case the distinction is just that an in-place
> build stores intermediate build artifacts somewhere inside the source tree,
> so that future builds using that source tree can take advantage of them,
> while an out-of-place build stores them in some other designated directory.

... where the backend can still manage to take advantage of them if it
so chooses (and is able to - but so far no-one has a concrete example
of where that's not possible).

Paul