We are now fully compliant with PEP 517 and PEP 518 (see this three article series by @gaborbernat for more information), and so I'd like to start building our release artifacts using a PEP 517 build front-end.

At the moment, I think the best one is the pep517 library. The easiest thing to do is to change this part of release.py over to a single call to pep517.build:

subprocess.check_call(['python', '-m', 'pep517.build', '--binary', '--source', '.'])

We will also want to specify the sdist format as gztar in our setup.cfg file, similar to how it's done here. This adds a dependency on pep517 >= 0.5.0.

To Do:

• Convert setup.py invocation to pep517.build invocation
• Add pep517 >= 0.5.0 to requirements-dev.txt
• Add gztar option to setup.cfg