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

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> I'm going to be pushing an update to one of my projects to PyPI this week
> and so I figured I could use this opportunity to help with patches to the
> User Guide's packaging tutorial.
>
> But to do that I wanted to ask what the current best practices are.
>
> * Are we even close to suggesting wheels for source distributions?

No, wheels don't replace source distributions at all. They just let
you install something without having to have whatever built the wheel
from its sdist. It is currently nice to have them available.

I'd like to see an ambitious person begin uploading wheels that have
no traditional sdist.

> * Are we promoting (weakly, strongly?) the signing of distributions yet?

No change.

> * Are we saying "use setuptools" for everyone, or still only if you need it
> (asking since there is a stub about installing setuptools but the simple
> example doesn't have a direct need for it ATM, but could use find_packages()
> and such)?

Setuptools is the preferred distutils-derived system. distutils should
no longer be considered morally superior.

The MEBS idea, or a simple setup.py emulator and a contract with the
installer on which commands it will actually call, will eventually let
you do a proper job of choosing build systems.