On 17 July 2013 20:52, Daniel Holth <dholth@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 3:39 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry@python.org> wrote:
On Jul 17, 2013, at 08:34 PM, Oscar Benjamin wrote:
I imagined that distro packaging tools would end up using the wheel as an intermediate format when building a deb from a source deb.
Do you mean, the distro would download the wheel or that it would build it during the build step for the archive? Probably not the former, as any binary blobs in a wheel would both violate policy and likely be inappropriate for all the platforms we build for.
The distro packager will likely only have to type "python -m some_tool install ... " instead of "setup.py install ...". IIRC distro packaging normally does installation into some temporary directory which is then archived to create the distro package. The existence of wheel probably doesn't make any difference.
Currently sdists provides a relatively uniform interface in the way that the setup.py can be used for build/installation. If non-traditional sdists become commonplace then that will not be the case any more. On the other hand the wheel format provides not just a uniform interface but a formally specified one that I imagine is more suitable for the kind of automated processing that is done by distros. I'm not a distro packager but I imagined that they would find it more convenient to have tools that turn one formally specified format into another than to run the installation in a monkey-patched environment. Oscar