On 21 August 2013 09:09, Donald Stufft <donald@stufft.io> wrote:

On Aug 21, 2013, at 4:07 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore@gmail.com> wrote:

OK, so here's a concrete question for distutils-sig. If I want to use wheels in my app (built them, install them, whatever) what should I use as my "reference implementation". I don't want to implement the code myself, I just want to produce lowest-common-denominator wheels that can be used anywhere, and consume wheels that conform to the spec correctly. This is not a hypothetical question - in the first instance I'm looking to add support for loading setuptools/pip from wheels in virtualenv, and I need to know what code to bundle to make that happen.

Probably Wheel at this point. There's just the problem with the scripts which we need to actually get into the PEP and implemented.

I thought someone would say that. Wheel implies a dependency on setuptools (pkg_resources) which is viable for the virtualenv use case, but makes me somewhat sad in the more general case (because depending on setuptools at runtime feels wrong to me and there's no standalone pkg_resources). But nevertheless I think you're right. Thanks.

Paul