[Distutils] moving things forward (was: wheel including files it shouldn't)

[Chris Barker]

On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 6:37 PM, Robert Collins <robertc at robertcollins.net>
wrote:

>
> Thats good. It occurs to me that scientific builds may be univerally
> broken because folk want to avoid easy-install and the high cost of
> double builds of things. E.g. adding bootstrap_requires will let folk
> fix things?
>

scientific builds are universally "broken" because their dependencies are
often non-python (and oftne complex and hard to build) external libs.

that is simply a problem that setuptools and pip were never designed to
address.


> But the main question is : why are these packages staying inaccurate?
> Even in the absence of a systematic solution I'd expect bug reports
> and pull requests to converge on good dependencies.
>

the problem is not that people haven't declared the proper dependencies in
their packages -- it's because it's impossible to declare the proper
dependencies in their packages...

The solution is to do one of three things:

1) punt -- and let folks use Canopy, or conda, or third party collections
of wheels like the Gohlke repository, or let folks build it themselves (a
lot of packages have all kinds of custom code to go look in macports, or
homebrew, or fink locations for libs on OS-X for instance.

2) build binary wheels that statically link in everything needed (or
include the dlls in the package)

3) make binary wheels out of C libs, so that other packages can depend on
them --  this is kind of a kludgy hack (abuse?) of pip/wheel but should be
do-able.

Some folks are making a valiant effort to do a combination of (2) and (3)
for Windows, OS-X, and now many linux -- but it is too bad that the tools
don't make it easy. And so far, all we really have are the core scipy stack
(and pyQT5???)

In short -- building fully supported binary packages is possible, but
requires a fair bit of expertise and a valiant effort on the part of
someone...

-CHB


-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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