[Distutils] Installing from a wheel

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 12:21 PM, Oscar Benjamin
<oscar.j.benjamin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 21 August 2013 15:57, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> A fresh virtualenv would have been the humane way to get a working
>> 'pip install wheel'.
>
> Good point. I think I learned an important point going through that
> upgrade mess though: uninstall/reinstall is safer than upgrade.
>
>> Wheel's built in installer isn't intended to replace or be better than
>> pip in any way. It's just for reference or bootstrapping.
>
> Fair enough. Can I suggest that it have a --version option (since it
> is traditional)?

There is a nearly-done PR in wheel's https://bitbucket.org/dholth/wheel

>> FYI if you point pip directly at the .whl file you can omit --use-wheel.
>
> Okay I've just tried that and that's definitely the way I want to use it.
>
> So basically:
> $ python setup.py bdist_wheel  # Makes wheels
>     and
> $ pip install foo.whl  # Installs wheels
>
> If someone wants to import the bdist_wheel command and use it outside
> of setuptools setup() (in the way that numpy does) where should they
> import it from? I'm thinking of something like this:
> https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/master/numpy/distutils/command/bdist_rpm.py
>
> Is the following appropriate?
>
> from wheel.bdist_wheel import bdist_wheel
>
> class mybdist_wheel(bdist_wheel):
>      ...
>
> (the wheel API docs don't describe using bdist_wheel from Python code.)

It should be about as appropriate as any distutils subclassing or
extension exercise... a lot of debugging work and probably a bad
idea... but if you must, that's how you would do it.

>
> Oscar