Please restore --owner= and --group= options to setuptools' sdist command

[zackw]

Tar archives record the Unix ownership (user and group) of each file they contain. This can cause undesirable variation between source tarballs generated from the same VCS checkout but in different build environments, so distutils.command.sdist.sdist has options --owner=[username] and --group=[groupname] to override the recorded ownership. However, setuptools.command.sdist.sdist supersedes the user_options array of its parent class and makes most of the options inaccessible, including --owner and --group.

Please restore these options. The simplest change to achieve this would be to copy the --owner and --group array entries from distutils.command.sdist.sdist.user_options to setuptools.command.sdist.sdist.user_options. I have written a monkeypatch in my setup.py that does exactly this, so I can confirm that no other changes to setuptools' code are required. However, a more future-proof change would be to have setuptools.command.sdist.sdist copy its parent class's user_options array and remove only those entries that are definitely not wanted.

[J-M0]

As a workaround, it looks like you can still put these options in your setup.cfg and they will be respected even with setuptools:

[sdist]
owner = root
group = root