[Distutils] pip merges wheel

[Nick Coghlan]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Eric V. Smith <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> On 3/18/2013 5:16 PM, Lennart Regebro wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>> I still think it is unfortunate that we are starting to extend pip to
>> be a tool for developers to create distributions. It would be better
>> of pip was kept as an install tool, and we added the utilities for
>> creating distributions separate.
>
> I completely agree. And those tools to build distributions could be
> downloaded separately.

As Marcus already noted, we cannot achieve this nirvana until the
primary distribution format for Python software is something other
than source archives. pip's support of the wheel format is a necessary
step on that path - it's already a build system *because* our current
"installation" command is "./setup.py install", and handling that
command invokes the build system.

Eventually I expect pip will grow a "--wheel-only" option to run it in
strict "installer only" mode, but the ecosystem is a long way from
supporting that being a useful option (especially since there are some
cases which will still require falling back to the "build from source"
model).

Cheers,
Nick.

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