On Jul 17, 2013, at 3:44 PM, Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin@gmail.com> wrote:

I meant the latter. The source deb would comprise the sdist (that may
or may not be "traditional") and other distro files. The author of the
sdist designed it with the intention that it could be turned into a
wheel in some way (perhaps not the traditional one). So the natural
way to build it is to use the author's intended build mechanism, end
up with a wheel, and then convert that to an installable deb.

As far as I know that's not how distros package things.

They'll take the source and package it into a source package for their platform, and then their build machines will build binary packages for all the archectures they support. I don't suspect the distros to use Wheels at all.

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