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

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Wed, May 31, 2017, at 02:24 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
> Cool, thanks for doing that - I'll let you thrash out the details with
> Thomas as the PEP author, and then take a look once you're in
> agreement on the amendments you want to make.

I've had a quick look over the PR, and my main thought is that if we're
going to specify a 'build sdist' step, we need to specify more precisely
what an sdist actually means. The PEP as currently written expects a
'source tree' as the input for building a wheel, but does not really
need to specify sdists, beyond being a possible source of a source tree.
If the backend needs to produce an sdist from a source tree, I think we
need a clearer picture of what the expected result looks like.

Thomas