pip grabs tar.gz file instead of whl?

[Mark Lawrence]

On 16/05/2015 03:17, Chris Angelico wrote:
> 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.
>>
>
> 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
>

The whole point is that setup.py never works because it can't find VS 
despite the fact that I know I've got the correct version installed.  If 
I download a whl file, pip installs that version perfectly. If I try to 
get pip to download and install the very same file it gave the zipfile 
error I referred to earlier.  Hopefully all the problems with pip will 
get ironed out, or where do we go, distutils3? :(

-- 
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence