[Distutils] PEP 517 - specifying build system in pyproject.toml

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Sat, May 20, 2017, at 05:36 PM, Steve Dower wrote:
> I'll probably read the PEP closely and see that this is entirely 
> incorrect, but if it's right:
> 
> * encoding for text between the build UI and build tool should just be 
> specified once for all platforms (i.e. use UTF-8).

+1

> * encoding for text between build tool and the compiler depends on the 
> compiler
> 
> In general, since most subprocesses (at least on Windows) do not have 
> customizable encodings, the tool that launches them needs to know what 
> the encoding is. Since we don't live in a Python 3.6 world quite yet, 
> that means the tool should read raw bytes from the compiler and encode 
> them to UTF-8.

I half agree, but:
- Build tools may not 100% know what encoding output will be produced,
especially if the developer can supply a custom command for the build
tool to run.
- It's possible for data on a pipe to be binary data with no meaning as
text.
- As a lazy developer, I don't want to read stdout/stderr from a
subprocess only to spit it back to my own stdout/stderr. I'd much rather
just launch the subprocess and let it use the same stdout/stderr as my
build tool.

So I think it's most practical to recommend that build tools produce
UTF-8 (if not sys.stdout.isatty()), but let build tool developers decide
how far they go to comply with that.

Thomas