I mentioned it in the other thread that’s going on, but I think that it would be great if we started… rebranding? the name of sdist. It’s kind of an awkward name to pronounce, and I think that the fact it feels wholly distinct from wheels makes it harder for people to to self discover that these are all pieces of the same pie and not wholly distinct things.
Thus I think it would be great if we actually treaeted sdists as a while as this weird legacy format and started to transition to “source wheels” which used an extension like .src.whl or .swhl or something. This makes it much easier to handle the transition IMO, similiarly to how .whl made it easier to handle the transition from eggs to wheels.
However that doesn’t exactly mean that this PEP is wrong, I think it just needs to either decide what exactly it is trying to do, and stick with that. If it’s just trying to make a small tweak to the existing sdist format to make it easier to parse, etc then I think it’s fine to just do the very small thing and keep the .tar.gz extension, keep the sdist name, etc and just provide a documented standard for what we expect the name to be. If we start adding new extensions and such, then I think we should go all in on a real new alternative and weave in the ideas like in Sdist idea: specifying static metadata that can be trusted and talk more about what we actually want our source format to look like.
Fundamentally changing the extension is going to come with a migration cost, and I don’t think we should pay that cost unless it comes with real benefits for end users, not just making it moderately easier for tools to parse the file names.
In other words, I think the middle ground that this PEP tries to tread ends up being a less ideal outcome than either just standardizing what we currently have OR going all in on defining a standardized source format.