Use Flit for packaging?

[whereswaldon]

@Alexander255 Just discovered a package/util for making uploading to PyPI easier. Might simplify our process. It's called Flit, and it is configured through an ini file instead of a setup.py file. I believe that it is cross-platform too, which is nice. Thoughts?

[ntninja]

I've looked at back when you opened the issue, but didn't write a response yet. Sorry.

I really like what flit is trying to achieve, but I'm really worried about compatibility with existing implementations of pip (see pypa/flit#74). Also flite apparently hard-codes the useage of README.rst for the package description (which we converted to MarkDown when switching to the standardized-README), but I think this would probably be something that can be worked around easily enough.
I'm also not sure how/if this would interact with testing?

My current verdict: Maybe, but it needs some thorough investigation first. Maybe we should wishlist this?

[ntninja]

So I looked at flit again the last couple of days and I'm very happy with what I see: 😁

• flit can now create sdist files (by generating a tiny setuptools-style package)
• Flit has a hidden feature for reading the decription from MarkDown files and converting it on-the-fly to ReST by call pandoc through pypandoc, see: Obtain package description from README.md (Markdown) pypa/flit#127
  • This is very similar to our current hack, but less ugly (for us at least)
  • The author has also “[doesn't] see any reason to get rid of the hidden pandoc feature, and if I ever do, I'll do so with a deprecation cycle unless there's a really good reason that's not practical.” – So this feature shouldn't just disappear overnight
  • The latest PyPA specs actually specify a new Description-Content-Type field, that can be used by packages to signal that their description isn't in reStructuredText, but in MarkDown or plain text (but Python Warehose and Legacy-PyPI don't support it yet). So there is a clear migration path into the future here.
• Testing works after applying a small tweak to tox' configuration

I've uploaded a demo of the flit-converted package here: https://test.pypi.org/project/ipfsapi/

Unless any grave issues are discovered we should totally do this! 👍

[ntninja]

We now use flit! \o/