[Distutils] pip merges wheel

[Nick Coghlan]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Marcus Smith <qwcode at gmail.com> wrote:
> the pip docs have a cookbook entry now for the wheel support
> http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/cookbook.html#building-and-installing-wheels
>
> the usage reference is up to date as well
> http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/usage.html

Great news!

Given Glyph's questions, It may be a good idea to add a "publishing
wheels" entry to the cookbook, explaining:

1. After building the wheel, publishing it to PyPI means users on a
matching system can download and install it without building it
2. The current caveats on handling C extensions that are *wrappers*
around shared libraries/DLLs that are expected to be installed on the
target system, rather than CPython-only C extensions. (Specifically,
bundled DLLs on Windows should work just fine, but depending on system
binaries on *nix systems can cause problems if other users have the
right SO version installed, and bundling on *nix systems may require
tweaking of the environment to find the bundled SO instead of only
looking in the system paths)
3. Users currently need to add a "--use-wheel" flag to enable the
wheel support. It is expected that using wheels will become the
default behaviour in the feature, but we want it to be opt in until it
has seen some more widespread real word usage.

Cheers,
Nick.

>
> Marcus
>
>
> On Sat, 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.
>>
>> "pip wheel ..." uses the wheel reference implementation ("pip install
>> wheel") to compile a dependency tree as .whl archives. Used together
>> with "pip install --use-wheel ..." it provides a powerful way to speed
>> up repeated installs and reap other good packaging benefits. I've been
>> using this code in production for months and it works well.
>>
>> I am now a pip maintainer. We are committed to offering excellent
>> wheel support in pip including a good way to produce and consume the
>> format. In the future we will likely refactor the code to offer the
>> same features with more distlib and less setuptools but this change
>> will be mostly transparent to the end user. Once everyone is
>> comfortable with the format we will move towards installing wheels by
>> default when they are available instead of requiring the --use-wheel
>> flag.
>>
>> Enjoy! Please share your experiences with the new feature. The most
>> common issue is that you must install distribute >= 0.6.34 for
>> everything to work well.
>>
>> Daniel Holth
>> _______________________________________________
>> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>



-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia