On Sep 19, 2015, at 12:35 AM, Thomas Kluyver wrote: >By the way, I am also upstream for flit, and I'm prepared to help build >some tooling to use it for distro packaging. I know it will cause some >inconvenience in the short term because there's infrastructure around >setup.py packaging, but ultimately I think that having declarative >metadata should be an advantage.
There have been countless attempts at moving the Python packaging infrastructure to a declarative syntax over the years. I remember talking to Tarek at a Pycon *many* years ago about this. Maybe this time it'll catch on. :) flit doesn't build sdists, so I guess the current toolchain which starts with .orig.tar.gz won't work with flitted packages. The README says: "People may also want a traditional sdist for other reasons, such as Linux distro packaging. I hope that these problems will diminsh over time." I'm not sure which problem you hope will diminish! People wanting traditional sdists, the problem of Linux distro packaging <wink> or needing sdists for downstream consumers like Debian. OTOH, as wheels get more popular for upstream package distributions, I do think we need a good story for turning wheels into debs. There's some work ongoing to turn debs back into wheels: https://github.com/paulproteus/dirtbike Cheers, -Barry
