[Distutils] pip merges wheel

[Glyph]

On Mar 16, 2013, at 5:06 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> Earlier today we merged the existing wheel branch into mainline pip.
> This adds opt-in wheel install support (built into pip, "pip install
> --use-wheel ...") and the convenient "pip wheel ..." command for
> creating the wheels you need.

Hi!

I don't really understand all the issues that lead to the creation of the Wheel format, and I don't care to.  But, I _very_ much would like some of the advertised benefits, such as being able to install binary packages on Windows.  Well, _I_ don't care about installing binary packages on Windows.  But I want users of Twisted on Windows to be able to 'pip install twisted' and just get a working install without having to learn about MSVCRT versions and the various miseries thereof.  I am quite excited about the possibility that such a situation might be near our grasp.

My understanding is that in order to achieve this nirvana, what we must do is:

A twisted developer, on each supported Windows configuration, must 'pip install wheel; pip wheel ./Twisted' and place that build artifact on PyPI.
Make our dependencies do the same thing.
Tell our users to do 'pip install --use-wheel twisted'

I have two questions: first, is this sequence of steps accurate, and if it is, why is '--use-wheel' not just the default?  Does this option just mean '--please-work --no-really' or is there some functional change in behavior in using wheels that might cause problems?

Thanks a lot!

-glyph
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