[Distutils] Q about best practices now (or near future)

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 17 July 2013 19:46, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>On Jul 17, 2013, at 11:46 AM, Daniel Holth wrote:
>>
>>I'd like to see an ambitious person begin uploading wheels that have
>>no traditional sdist.
>
> You're not getting rid of sdists are you?
>
> Please note that without source distributions (preferably .tar.gz) your
> package will never get distributed on a Linux distro.
>
> Maybe the keyword here is "traditional" though.

Yeah, I think what Daniel means is that the sdist->wheel
transformation could be done by a tool unlike distutils and
setuptools. The sdist as supplied would not be something that could be
directly installed with 'python setup.py install' but it could be
turned into a wheel by bento/waf/yaku/scons etc.

> In that case, keep in mind
> that at least in Debian and its derivatives, we have a lot of tools that make
> it pretty trivial to package something setup.py based from PyPI.  If/when that
> goes away, it will be more difficult to get new package updates, until the
> distro's supporting tools catch up.

I imagined that distro packaging tools would end up using the wheel as
an intermediate format when building a deb from a source deb. Would
that not make things easier long-term? In the short term, you can
expect that whatever solution people use is likely to be convertible
to a traditional sdist in some straight-forward way e.g. 'bentomaker
sdist'.


Oscar