[Distutils] string types for paths in PEP 517

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 1:00 AM, Thomas Kluyver <thomas at kluyver.me.uk> wrote:
> I considered this. It's *potentially* a problem, but I think we should
> not try to deal with it for now:
>
> - Normally, temp files will go in /tmp - so it should be fine to
> construct paths of entirely ascii characters.

Does pip in fact use /tmp for temporary directories? (It's not always
the right choice, because /tmp has limited space on some systems, e.g.
b/c it's on a ramdisk. If we still had build_directory= then this
could be an issue, since build directories can be arbitrarily large;
maybe it's not a big deal now that we only need the tmpdir to handle a
single sdist/wheel/dist-info.)

> - Frontends that want the wheel to end up elsewhere can ask for it in a
> tmp directory first and then move it, so there's a workaround if it
> becomes an issue.
> - We already have workarounds for the commonest case of UTF-8 paths + C
> locale: ignore the locale and treat paths as UTF-8.

Only in 3.7, I think? Or do you mean, backends should be doing this
manually on Python 2?

(To be clear, I think the current text is potentially fine, I just
want to make sure I/we understand the full consequences instead of
discovering them a year from now when we're stuck with them :-).)

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org