what versions of setuptools does the new argument require ?

I tested down to setuptools 50 and got no error. But, the first mention of --build-option in the setuptools source was introduced alongside the deprecation in setuptools 63: pypa/setuptools#3380 . It seems older versions just ignore all unrecognized arguments.

I found that --build-option was specified PEP 517: https://peps.python.org/pep-0517/#config-settings , but only recently implemented.

If we want to ensure that gztar is built on older setuptools, we could do a version check?

@gaborbernat I don't think this could go out as is given the above

I guess the question here if older setuptools just ignored this flag or actually used it 🤔 Wonder if need this flag at all or we can just drop it 🤔

I believe on windows the flag is important -- otherwise it'll default to zip ?

Would that cause a problem for pip?

it shouldn't be a problem for pip -- but I thought tox tries to read the tgz -- maybe I'm misremembering how this works -- not at a computer to check

tox does not read the file 🤔

this is what I was thinking of but looks like it already supports zip:

we can probably drop the option entirely then

That seems reasonable to me too, done in #2497.