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

[Paul Moore]

On 23 May 2017 at 17:16, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yep, and that's also why I want to avoid trying to use it to improve
> the encoding handling situation - pip and other tools have to deal
> with the current mess regardless, and there's already likely to be
> some significant churn in this space as a result of the changes Victor
> and I have proposed for Python 3.7.

Encoding issues have been around in pip for many years, with little or
no progress. We might be getting a handle on things now (Thomas'
initial email in this thread was very timely - the fact that I was in
the middle of working on the encoding issue in pip was the only reason
I picked up on the need for clarity in the PEP) but I'd be very
cautious about saying we've got it solved until we have the latest
changes in a released version of pip and we get some feedback (or
silence, more likely) from international users.

One of the reasons I made the point about ease of testing earlier in
the thread is that we've found it's extremely difficult to pin down
the root of the reported problems in pip - the route that badly
encoded data takes from build tool to pip's output is pretty
convoluted. Anything that adds clear-cut boundaries at which we can
make guarantees about the integrity of the data will help a lot with
this in the future.

Paul