[Distutils] PEP 517 reference consumer

[Paul Moore]

On 12 November 2017 at 18:59, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> I have found a bit more time to work on my PEP 517 consumer API:
>
> https://github.com/takluyver/pep517
>
> It provides two main interfaces:
> - 'pep517.wrappers' is a lower-level interface to call the backend hooks
> in a subprocess.
> - 'pep517.envbuild' is a higher-level interface which creates a
> temporary environment, uses pip to install build dependencies, and
> builds a wheel or an sdist.

Nice :-)

> I hope that some frontend tools will be able to use these interfaces
> directly,

Is it (in your opinion) something that pip might be able to use? The
biggest potential hurdle, I would imagine, is that if pep517.envbuild
uses pip to install dependencies, and pip uses pep517.envbuild,
there's a risk of a recursive loop that could result in starting an
arbitrarily large number of processes on the user's machine (this is
one of the issues that has stalled the current work on PEP 517 for
pip). On the other hand, other frontends depending on pip (indirectly,
via pep517.envbuild) might seem a bit odd.

> but I also intend it as a reference consumer which backend
> authors can use to test their implementation. As such, I'd like to
> propose moving the project into the control of the Python Packagaing
> Authority - i.e. transferring the Github repo and giving other people
> upload rights on PyPI.

+1 to that suggestion.

Paul