[Distutils] pip merges wheel

[Glyph]

On Mar 18, 2013, at 4:52 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:39 PM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:
>> On Mar 18, 2013, at 04:13 PM, Nick Coghlan wrote:
>> 
>>> 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).
>> 
>> If that's the end goal, then it should be the default now.
> 
> No, user experience is king. Right now, defaulting to wheel-only would
> be an awful user experience (because you wouldn't be able to install
> anything), as well as being completely backwards incompatible with the
> current behaviour (because everything would break).

But it could default to wheels-and-other-things right now without breaking anything, right? What's the rationale for not just preferring wheels if they're available?

-glyph