[Distutils] PEP 517: Open questions around artifact export directories

[Donald Stufft]

> On Jun 12, 2017, at 9:27 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> 5) Drop the prepare_files hook
>> Rationale: it's purpose is somewhat unclear at this point, and it
>> gives up the main advantage of going through sdist (the guarantee that
>> building from sdist and building from unpacked tree give the same
>> results) while still having the main disadvantages (you have to copy
>> everything and lose incremental rebuilds).
> 
> The main reason this made it into the PEP is that build_sdist may have
> additional dependencies that prepare_build_files doesn't (e.g. Thomas
> has indicated that flit needs to call out to VCS tools to build a full
> sdist, but can export its own input files directly).
> 
> So while it's technically a "make it faster" hook rather than an
> essential "make it right" hook, I think just smoothing out the
> interaction between pip & flit specifically provides sufficient value
> to make it worth including in the initial version of the
> specification.


Just as an anecdote, today requests pushed a brown paper bag release because they created a wheel out of a checkout of the requests repository, which happened to have some .pyc files and directories left over from git and some refactoring. This caused the library to be completely broken as released in the wheel. This is the kind of error that creating a sdist ideally hopes to eliminate (and hopefully the make it faster hook doesn’t end up invalidating that point).

—
Donald Stufft



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