[Distutils] distlib updated to include "entry point" functionality

[Paul Moore]

On 10 October 2012 23:15, PJ Eby <pje at telecommunity.com> wrote:
> However, for the application platform plugins use case, wheels can
> potentially be quite awesome, because you can build one fat wheel for
> all your supported platforms.  "We don't want to inlcude .pyc files
> for all the Pythons you might use" doesn't apply to the "we" who
> already build and release different platform-specific eggs to cover
> multiple platforms and Python versions.  ;-)

I really don't understand the whole idea of including .pyc files in
binary distributions - all they do is *reduce* the flexibility of the
distribution by tying it to a single Python version. Far better to
just ship the .py files and let the system compile them on demand (or
if you absolutely insist, compile them at install time).

Note - wheels are a binary *distribution* format, and as such aren't
intended to be placed on sys.path directly. The fact that they can be
is not important, that's just a side effect of using a zipfile with a
simple internal layout. I concede that things are different for eggs
which were intended to be an importable format (AIUI, more so than a
distribution format, even).

Of course, "fat" wheels containing multiple versions of *compiled*
code (maybe for different architectures, or API versions) are
conceivable - although I don't think the current internal layout of
the wheel format supports that.

Paul.