[Distutils] Provisionally accepting PEP 517's declarative build system interface

[Nick Coghlan]

On 3 June 2017 at 20:09, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 3, 2017, at 10:55 AM, Paul Moore wrote:
>> This is getting very off-topic, but what if I wanted to patch the
>> source and then build a sdist to put into my local PyPI index? I
>> presume the answer is that I either have to checkout the original
>> sources from VCS or I have to build only wheels and maintain my source
>> patches some other way. I can think of realistic reasons why neither
>> of these 2 options are practical, but it is of course your prerogative
>> to not support those cases.
>
> Another alternative would be to unpack the sdist, carefully modify the
> files you want, and tar it back up manually. If this is needed a lot, it
> shouldn't be hard to write tools to help with this.
>
> I'm not going to claim this is a perfect system, but I prefer it to
> every alternative I've thought of so far. ;-)

This is why I haven't understood your insistence that flit can't
support sdist export from an sdist tree: if PKG-INFO is already
present, there's nothing to generate, just copy the entire directory
again. If any modifications have been made they'll get captured
automatically.

I like the idea of backends being able to modify PKG-INFO to indicate
that the sdist has been modified since the original export (if they
want to do so), so it does make sense to me to leave that check up to
the backend, rather than telling frontends to only call the sdist
export if PKG-INFO is missing.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia