[Distutils] A possible refactor/streamlining of PEP 517

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2017 at 6:36 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's my own summary.
>
> pip can do build_sdist -> unpack sdist -> build wheel if it wants to,
> serving as some kind of linter if you happen to run 'pip install .' during
> development.
>
> build_directory provides a way to ask for a clean build, the lack of which
> causes problems in bdist_wheel sometimes. It is one way to try harder to
> generate a correct wheel, not try harder to generate a correct sdist.

I would say -- build_directory provides a way to ask that the source
tree be left clean for next time. This is unfortunately not quite the
same. From pip's point of view, the advantages of build_sdist are
twofold: (1) it validates the sdist building path, (2) it really does
give a clean build.

This is discussed more here:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2017-July/031020.html

(I know you've read it, but putting the link in for future archive readers etc.)

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org