On Fri, Jul 28, 2017, at 04:16 PM, Daniel Holth wrote:
> It looks like we've run out of things to say about PEP 517, except, how soon 
> can we get it into pip?
I admire your optimism! ;-)

While I partly hope that I get a unanimous disagreement, as it would be 
simpler, I have a nagging concern about something that someone mentioned ages 
ago: does it make sense for building sdists and building wheels to be part of 
the same backend?
Flit now makes both sdists and wheels, but for a long time it only made wheels, 
and the two parts are largely separate: it wouldn't take much work to use 
flit's sdist machinery but build the wheel with a different tool (e.g. if it 
had compiled parts).
Requiring one backend to build both formats may result in a significantly 
higher barrier to entry for backend developers: I don't know if I would have 
started writing flit if PEP 517 had already been finalised and I had to make 
both wheels and sdists to comply with it. They're also, at least to my mind, 
quite different kinds of thing: an sdist is almost like an archive of a VCS 
tag, whereas a wheel is the end result of any build steps the project needs.
So I'd like us to circle back round and reconsider allowing projects to specify 
'use tool X to make wheels, and tool Y to make sdists'. If everyone else thinks 
that's unnecessary, I think we'd all be glad to finish this discussion up, but 
this concern has been growing in my mind for a while, and I want to get it out 
there before we finalise the PEP.
Thomas

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