[Distutils] Packages that have problems being installed from wheels

[Donald Stufft]

> On Aug 27, 2014, at 2:50 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> tl; dr; If you know of a project that can't be successfully installed
> with "pip wheel proj; pip install /path/to/the/wheel.whl" can you let
> me know the details?
> 
> One of the longer-term goals of the introduction of wheels was to
> split the build and install steps for a package - specifically, in
> pip, to restrict "pip install" to installing from wheels, and when no
> wheel is available, to (transparently) run "pip wheel" on the sdist
> followed by "pip install on the generated wheel". During a discussion
> yesterday, I realised that I don't know how close we are to that goal.
> So I'm looking for information on packages which don't install
> properly from wheels at the moment. If anyone has examples of packages
> where replacing "pip install foo" with "pip wheel -w /tmp/xxx; pip
> install /tmp/xxx/*.whl" does not result in an equivalent install,
> could they post them here with details of how & why they fail?
> 
> Things I already know about (but would like specific examples):
> 
> 1. Post-install steps included in setup.py. That should be covered by
> the support in Metadata 2.0. I'd also be interested in how much of an
> issue omitting the postinstall would be in practice (for instance many
> such steps just set up "Start Menu" type shortcuts, which are not
> essential for the package to be usable).
> 2. Actually, that's the only one :-)
> 
> Things that should not be a problem (but might be):
> 
> 1. Numpy (and the scipy stack) need better tagging facilities for
> wheels - but that wouldn't matter for a wheel that's built, used, then
> thrown away.
> 2. Some things are complex to build - but I don't know of any cases
> where building a wheel is *more* complex than installing, and I don't
> see how it could be, in theory.
> 3. Projects that customise setup.py so much that they aren't
> compatible with setuptools and bdist_wheel. Such projects are quite
> probably already incompatible with pip (which injects setuptools when
> running setup.py anyway) and so not relevant for this discussion. But
> if any do work with "pip install" but not "pip wheel", I'd like to
> hear about them.
> 
> Thanks in advance for any information.
> Paul
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
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Numpy (and other SciPy stack) has the problem too that it uses numpy.distutils
so I'm not even sure if ``pip wheel`` actually works on it at all or not. They
might have their own support for ``setup.py bdist_wheel`` though I don't know.

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

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