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

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 17 July 2013 20:52, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
>
> 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.

Currently sdists provides a relatively uniform interface in the way
that the setup.py can be used for build/installation. If
non-traditional sdists become commonplace then that will not be the
case any more. On the other hand the wheel format provides not just a
uniform interface but a formally specified one that I imagine is more
suitable for the kind of automated processing that is done by distros.

I'm not a distro packager but I imagined that they would find it more
convenient to have tools that turn one formally specified format into
another than to run the installation in a monkey-patched environment.


Oscar