[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
> On Jul 17, 2013, at 08:34 PM, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
>
>
>>I imagined that distro packaging tools would end up using the wheel as
>>an intermediate format when building a deb from a source deb.
>
> Do you mean, the distro would download the wheel or that it would build it
> during the build step for the archive?  Probably not the former, as any binary
> blobs in a wheel would both violate policy and likely be inappropriate for all
> the platforms we build for.
>
> -Barry

The distro packager will likely only have to type "python -m some_tool
install ... " instead of "setup.py install ...". IIRC distro packaging
normally does installation into some temporary directory which is then
archived to create the distro package. The existence of wheel probably
doesn't make any difference.

However a pure-Python wheel on pypi might be something a distro could
work with or it could be an intermediate format compiled just-in-time
by the distro.

The new json metadata probably will affect the distros more.