Twitter thread re: Big Picture

How much easier can this be if we assume someone already has a valid/tested wheel/sdist? Could we say “tested externally” (for those that aren’t being published by Red Hat)? That’s no worse than PyPI, and still better in other ways.

And to be clear, I’m assuming the tools need writing or improving before we can seriously recommend them for this case. Having to restructure a project completely for each target is obviously a non-starter, but most projects seem to be starting with wheels in mind these days.

Not just the tools, the packaging metadata can improve too.
The extensible pyproject.toml is actually quite exciting: if you have a valid project for wheel/sdist, it should get you a RPM that puts the bits on disk, plus there’s a way to add the details missing for other purposes.
Then, if some of those details are useful more widely, they can be blessed by PyPA and distro packagers told to offer them upstream rather than keep them in distro-specific configuration.

Overall I think we agree that the future is bright, just need some engineering to make it happen.
On my list of priorities for Fedora, these tools are right after rebuilding everything for Python 3.8 (to get the beta tested this time), and removing Python 2 :‍)

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