[Distutils] What does it mean for Python to "bundle pip"?

[Paul Moore]

On 21 August 2013 21:35, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm reasonably confident the wheel format *doesn't* meet the scientific
> community's needs in the general case, and can't be made to do so without a
> lot of additional complexity. That's why I explicitly support the
> hashdist/conda approach which abandons some of the goals of pip and wheel
> (notably, easier handling of security updates and easier conversion to
> Linux distro packages) in order to better handle complex binary
> dependencies.


While "the general case" may include some specialised situations, in my
view, if the wheel format isn't a suitable replacement for bdist_wininst
(and by implication, cannot be used by the numpy, scipy and similar
projects to deliver Windows binary distributions) - maybe not for
specialised use, but certainly for casual users like myself - then it will
be essentially a failure.

The only reason I am interested in wheels *at all* is as a format that
allows me to "pip install" all those projects that currently provide
bdist_wininst installers. In the first instance, via "wheel convert", but
ultimately by the projects themselves switching from wininst format to
wheel (or via some form of build farm mechanism, it doesn't matter to me,
as long as the wheels are on PyPI).

Note that "wheel convert" is proof that this is the case right now, so this
is not setting the bar unreasonably high. Nor am I saying that there's even
a problem here at the moment. But if distutils-sig is sending a message
that they don't think wheels are a suitable distribution format for (say)
numpy or scipy, then I will be very disappointed.

Paul
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