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

[Paul Moore]

On 22 May 2017 at 11:22, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> I have made a PR against the PEP with my best take on the encoding
> situation:
> https://github.com/python/peps/pull/264/files

LGTM.

The only reservation I have is that the choice of UTF-8 means that on
Windows, build backends pretty much have to explicitly manage tool
output (as they are pretty much certain *not* to output in UTF-8).
Build backend writers that aren't aware of this issue (most likely
because their main platform is not Windows) could very easily choose
to just pass through the raw bytes, and as a result *all* non-ASCII
output would be garbled on non-UTF-8 systems.

Would locale.getpreferredencoding() not be a better choice here? I
know it has issues in some situations on Unix, but are they worse than
the issues UTF-8 would cause on Windows? After all it's the encoding
used by subprocess.Popen in "universal newlines" mode...

Paul