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

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 17 July 2013 17:59, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
>
> But it also sounds like that project providing wheel distributions is too
> early to include in the User's Guide.

There are already many guides showing how to use distutils/setuptools
to do things the old way. There are also confused bits of
documentation/guides referring to now obsolete projects that at one
point were touted as the future. It would be really good to have a
guide that shows how the new working with wheels and metadata way is
expected to work from the perspective of end users and package authors
even if this isn't fully ready yet.

I've been loosely following the packaging work long enough to see it
change direction more than once. I still find it hard to see the
complete picture for how pip, pypi, metadata, setuptools, setup.py,
setup.json, wheels and sdists are expected to piece together in terms
of what a package author is expected to do and how it affects end
users. A guide (instead of a load of PEPs) would be a great way to
clarify this for me and for the many others who haven't been following
the progress of this at all.


Oscar