[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Unix users will always want to compile their own.
>
> Yup.
>
>> Pip wheel is not going away
>
> I don't see how that follows.
>
> //Lennart

Is it too convenient? The tool knows how to find sources, compile
them, and install them. It will delegate all the work to the actual
build system.  If pip was a pure installer without a way to invoke a
build system then it wouldn't be able to install from sdist at all.

It would help if you'd describe the alternative workflow again. The
proposed workflow is "pip wheel package"; "pip install --find-links
wheelhouse --no-index package". We don't suggest uploading the wheels
used to cache compilation to pypi especially since most of them are
probably other people's packages.