[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Lennart Regebro]

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 10:08 PM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's a longer-term issue that occurred to me when thinking about
> pip's role as a "builder" or an "installer" (to use Nick's
> terminology).
>
> As I understand Nick's vision for the future, installers (like pip)
> will locate built wheels and download and install them, and builders
> (like distutils and bento) will be responsible for building wheels.
> But there's an intermediate role which shouldn't get forgotten in the
> transition - the role that pip currently handles with the "pip wheel"
> command. This is where I specify a list of distributions, and pip
> locates sdists, downloads them, checks dependencies, and ultimately
> builds all of the wheels. I'm not sure whether the current idea of
> builders includes this "locate, download and resolve dependencies"
> function (distutils and bento certainly don't have that capability).

Personally I don't see that as an intermediate role at all. That for
me is a builder.

> I imagine that pip will retain some form of the current "pip wheel"

I hope it will not.

//Lennart