[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Donald Stufft]

On Mar 27, 2013, at 10:05 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> I don't think you can, nor should you be able to, explicitly depend on something that is a VCS checkout.
> 
> I find it more useful to think of the issue as whether or not you
> allow publication of source tarballs to satisfy a dependency, or
> *require* publication of a fully populated sdist. If you allow raw
> source tarballs, then you effectively allow VCS checkouts as well. I
> prefer requiring an explicit publication step, but we also need to
> acknowledge that the installer ecosystem we're trying to replace
> allows them, and some people are relying on that feature.

Right, which is why I think the ability to install from a raw source is a good feature for an installer, but not for the dependency metadata. Following that we just need a standard way for a raw source tarball to declare what it's builder is, either via some sort of file that tells you that, or a build script , or something along those lines. 

> 
> However, as I've said elsewhere, for metadata 2.0, I *do not* plan to
> migrate the archiving or build steps away from setup.py. So "give me
> an sdist" will be spelled "python setup.py sdist" and "give me a wheel
> file"  will be spelled "python setup.py bdist_wheel".
> 
> There's also an interesting migration problem for pre-2.0 sdists,
> where we can't assume that "python setup.py bdist_wheel && pip install
> <created wheel>" is equivalent to "python setup.py install": projects
> like Twisted that run a post-install hook won't install properly if
> you build a wheel first, since the existing post-install hook won't
> run.
> 
> It's an interesting problem, but one where my near term plans amount
> to "document the status quo".
> 
> Cheers,
> Nick.
> 
> -- 
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia


-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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