What's the problem this feature will solve?

PEP 660 standardises the mechanism that setup.py develop uses to make "editable" packages.

Currently, pip needs to implement fairly horrible hacks to make legacy setup.py develop builds work. It'd be great if setuptools could implement PEP 660, which would be the last item from setuptools' end before pip can start the process of removing the legacy directly-call-setup.py build system.

Describe the solution you'd like

PEP 660's build_editable hook gets implemented in aetuptools.

Alternative Solutions

Not doing this.

I imagine this will mean that either (a) pip continues to maintain editable installs for setuptools or (b) pip drops the legacy build system entirely and users of setuptools projects will no longer be able to make editable installations.

I don't think (b) is happening any time soon, and it'd likely be best to implement the hook here.

Additional context

IIUC, this has been implemented in setuptools-pep660 already. It might not be a lot of work to migrate the work done there into seriptools directly.

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