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

[Paul Moore]

On 23 May 2017 at 16:20, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Taking that approach of just defining a helper API and expecting build
> backends to either use it or emulate it gives us some quite attractive
> properties:

Making the output data part of a structured API (and by implication,
saying that backends shouldn't be writing to stdout directly at all)
would definitely improve the situation, IMO. Frankly, it seems likely
that the only real way we're going to get backend developers to
consider encodings is by having the "build output" as a string value
passed back via the API, rather than implied in the fact that backends
can write to stdout/err. It also squarely places the responsibility
for dealing with the question of displaying full-range Unicode output
to the user onto the frontend.

However, it's a relatively big change to the PEP and there's a risk
that by endlessly reaching for perfection, we miss the chance to get
the PEP in at all (another lesson we should probably learn from PEP
426!)

Paul