[Distutils] Provisionally accepting PEP 517's declarative build system interface

[Thomas Kluyver]

I'm struggling to understand the objections here. As I understand the
PEP, the input to building a wheel is a source tree. That may come
from an unpacked sdist or a VCS checkout; hopefully those contain
basically the same files, give or take some unimportant generated
files in an sdist.
This seems to work for building wheels with setup.py (as pip already
does), and it's not a problem for flit. So why does pip need to know how
to make an sdist?
I understand the concern about copying many unnecessary files if the
source tree is copied into a build directory, though I'm not entirely
sure why we'd need to do that. I don't think the source tree is often so
big as to be problematic, though. My clone of the IPython repository,
with many years of active git history and a build of the Sphinx docs, is
still under 50 MB. Most repos I work with are much smaller. If we define
optional mechanisms to filter which files are copied, a fallback to
copying the whole directory sounds acceptable.
Thomas
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