Jason R. Coombs

I don't have an opinion on the matter, but I do have some preferences on how to approach it: - `distutils` is in a somewhat frozen state until Setuptools' users...

Yes, I agree it would be preferable to support Pathlike objects natively. Where possible, I'd like for distutils to simply pass these values along rather than handle them explicitly. Feel...

Yes, I think so. See https://github.com/pypa/distutils/tree/refactor/142-allow-pathlike for how I might handle the situation.

Why not raise an error, congruent to what happens for a missing package?

Let's go with the error approach. We can soften it to a warning if it proves necessary, but a warning will most likely go unnoticed and a multi-phase rollout for...

Consider also [this use-case](https://github.com/pipxproject/pipx/pull/344/files#diff-8393efe636b45e7e46ac74f5f82dcf0aR23-R30), where retrieving the list of dependencies of a given package is far from trivial. I'd really like to avoid recommending that users copy/paste whole segments of...

Another area of interaction is between `pep517` and `importlib.metadata`, illustrated by [importlib_metadata MR 113](https://gitlab.com/python-devs/importlib_metadata/-/merge_requests/113) (loading metadata for an unbuilt package). Does that belong in packaging also?

In pypa/setuptools#2116, a user has this case: - for a package, enumerate its extras and determine which extras are satisfied (requirements installed at their required versions)

Another use-case requested in python/importlib_metadata#450: ``` # an exception is thrown if any transitive dependency is not met pkg_resources.require(['Werkzeug>=0.6.1', 'Flask>=0.9']) ```

It occurs to me that even if editable packages were to expose some form of the "top level" packages they export, the `importlib.metadata.files()` method probably would still not work, at...