[Distutils] A possible refactor/streamlining of PEP 517

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Sat, Jul 15, 2017, at 08:33 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> I wonder if maybe it would be more useful to simply recommend that instead of shelling out to random vcs binaries that these projects depend on (or bundle) libraries to directly interact with a repository. For instance, if your project supports git, then you can use dulwich or pygit2 and then the invariant of “building inside of a docker container without `git` installed” still remains functional.
I did consider this kind of approach. It might be feasible for git using dulwich (pygit2 expects libgit2 on your system, so you can't just require it as a Python package). But it's ironically not workable with mercurial, even though it's pure Python, because hg uses Python 2, while flit requires Python 3. And I don't see this working reliably for svn, or bzr, or other less common VCSs.
So at least for flit, I think we will continue to rely on external, non-pip installable dependencies for this. This isn't a problem so long as building an sdist isn't necessary to get a project installed.
Thomas
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