On 11 February 2016 at 14:02, David Cournapeau <courn...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 1:52 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> We should probably also check with the flit people that the proposed >>>> approach works for them. (Are there any other alternative build >>>> systems apart from flit that exist at present?) >>> >>> I am not working on it ATM, but bento was fairly complete and could >>> interoperate w/ pip (a few years ago at least): >>> https://cournape.github.io/Bento/ >> >> I plan to test with Bento (I'm still using it almost daily to work on >> Scipy) when an implementation is proposed for pip. The interface in the PEP >> is straightforward though, I don't see any fundamental reason why it >> wouldn't work for Bento if it works for flit. > > It should indeed work, I was just pointing at an alternative build system ;)
Yes, I knew there was something other than flit, thanks for the reminder. > I am a bit worried about making a PEP for interfacing before we have a few > decent alternative implementations. Having the official interface is not > necessary to actually interoperate, even if it is ugly. Well, a lot of people have complained that setuptools is a problem. We've only really seen bento and now flit appear as alternatives, the only conclusion we've been able to draw is that the barrier to creating alternative build systems is the need to emulate setuptools. This PEP (hopefully!) removes that barrier, but I agree we need some validation that people who want to create alternative build systems (or have done so) can work with the interface in the PEP. There is some value to the PEP even if it doesn't enable new build tools (we can fix the problem of install_requires triggering easy_install) but the key has to be the evolution of (one or more) replacements for setuptools. You suggest getting more alternative build systems before implementing the PEP. That would be nice, but how would we get that to happen? People have been wanting alternatives to setuptools for years, but no-one has delivered anything (as far as I know) except for you and the flit guys. So my preference is to implement the PEP (and remove the "behave like setuptools" pain point), and then wait to see what level of adoption flit/bento achieve with the simpler interface and automated use of the declared build tool. At that stage, all of flit, bento and setuptools, as well as any newly developed tools, will be competing on an equal footing, and either one will emerge as the victor, or people will be free to choose their preferred tool without concern about whether it is going to work with pip. I'm not sure what we gain by waiting (incremental improvements to the spec can me made over time - as long as the basic form of the PEP is acceptable to *current* tool developers, I think that's sufficient). Paul _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - Distutils-SIG@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig