[Distutils] it's happened - wheels without sdists (flit)

[Paul Moore]

On 31 March 2015 at 08:04, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 30 March 2015 at 16:56, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>> Honestly, I don’t think that setup.py as a development interface is that
>> bad. It gets really bad when we start sticking it inside of a sdist and
>> using that as part of the installation metadata.
>>
>> It’s not unusual for me to want (or need) to do something a little bit
>> different in a project, or something that the original authors didn’t
>> quite intend to do. This is perfectly valid and fine inside of a file
>> that only ever gets executed on a developer machine. However it *needs*
>> to be “compiled” down to a static file when creating a sdist.
>
> Hmm, I don't think I'd ever really understood the distinction between
> "development setup" and "sdist" that clearly. I take your point, it's
> the sdist level that we want to avoid executable metadata formats in.

Thinking some more about that, my confusion is probably in part
because pip doesn't distinguish between a "development directory" and
a sdist at the moment. For both, it runs "setup.py
bdist_wheel/install". So I guess work on a new sdist format would have
to include pip learning to distinguish between a sdist and a working
directory, and installing (or building wheels from) the two things
differently.

Paul