[Distutils] Handling the binary dependency management problem

[Paul Moore]

On 2 December 2013 07:31, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> The only problem I want to take off the table is the one where
> multiple wheel files try to share a dynamically linked external binary
> dependency.

OK. Thanks for the clarification.

Can I suggest that we need to be very careful how any recommendation
in this area is stated? I certainly didn't get that impression from
your initial posting, and from the other responses it doesn't look
like I was the only one.

We're only just starting to get real credibility for wheel as a
distribution format, and we need to get a very strong message out that
wheel is the future, and people should be distributing wheels as their
primary binary format. My personal litmus test is the scientific
community - when Christoph Gohlke is distributing his (Windows) binary
builds as wheels, and projects like numpy, ipython, scipy etc are
distributing wheels on PyPI, rather than bdist_wininst, I'll feel like
we have got to the point where wheels are "the norm". The problem is,
of course, that with conda being a scientific distribution at heart,
any message we issue that promotes conda in any context will risk
confusion in that community.

My personal interest is as a non-scientific user who does a lot of
data analysis, and finds IPython, Pandas, matplotlib numpy etc useful.
At the moment I can pip install the tools I need (with a quick wheel
convert from wininst format). I don't want to find that in the future
I can't do that, but instead have to build from source or learn a new
tool (conda).

Paul