pip grabs tar.gz file instead of whl?

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 11:58 AM, Mark Lawrence <breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> The way I see it, pip is great for handling the most common case where
>> you just want to name a package and say "go fetch", but if you want to
>> override its decisions, you should use the lower-level facilities eg
>> manual downloading and setup.py. It's like with Debian packages: I can
>> type "sudo apt-get install blah" and it'll run off and grab it, check
>> its signatures, make sure everything's right, and then install it; but
>> if I want to install something from a different location, the best way
>> is usually to download it manually, do my own checking, and then "sudo
>> dpkg -i blah.deb" to actually install it - no apt-get involvement at
>> all. This shouldn't normally be a problem; you don't *have* to use pip
>> here, you just want to end up with the package properly installed.
>>
>> ChrisA
>>
>
> Being on Windows, as I said at the beginning of the thread, the biggest
> problem is that setup.py can't find VS if there is no whl file to install.
> Hence it is far easier to get the binaries from elsewhere. Hopefully this
> problem will disappear in the future as the whl standard becomes prevelant.
>
> As for sudo I always thought that was a type of Japanese wrestling :)

That'll be sumo :) sudo is "su do this", and it's like using "su",
then doing something, and then dropping out again. (su gives you a new
prompt as superuser, or as some other user.)

I don't know what the exact installation steps are for a whl, which is
why I mentioned setup.py. Whatever those lower-level facilities are,
those are what you'd use once you decide to skip pip and do your own
downloading.

ChrisA