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

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Sat, May 20, 2017, at 07:36 PM, Steve Dower wrote:
> Require that build tools either send UTF-8 to the UI component, or write 
> bytes to a file and call it a build output. I see no benefit in 
> requiring both the build tool and the UI tool to guess what the text 
> encoding is.

I'm not proposing that the install tool should try to guess the
encoding, but I think a well written install tool shouldn't crash if the
build output doesn't match the encoding it expects. Even if the spec
says that the build output MUST be UTF-8 encoded, build tools can have
bugs, and you don't want want the install to fail just because the log
isn't correctly encoded.

Hence, I think a 'SHOULD' is appropriate for this part of the spec:

- To install tool authors, it is clear that they can display the output
as UTF-8 so long as they don't crash if it's invalid.
- To build tool authors, it's clear that they can't pass the buck to
install tool authors if output gets jumbled because it's not UTF-8.

Thomas