[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Vinay Sajip]

Paul Moore <p.f.moore <at> gmail.com> writes:

> Of course if someone builds a "wheelmaker" tool that did precisely
> what "pip wheel" did, I would have no objections to using that. But

I already have made one, it's called wheeler.py [1]. It uses vanilla pip
(not the variant which provides pip wheel) to build wheels from sdists on PyPI.

The distil tool builds wheels with or without using vanilla pip as a helper; the
vanilla pip helper is needed where you *have* to run setup.py to get a correct
build (not always the case). With wheeler.py you need to install distlib, while
with distil it's included.

> even then, the mere existence of another tool doesn't seem to me to be
> enough justification for removing functionality from pip. If pip wheel
> didn't exist, and someone had written wheelmaker, I would not be
> arguing to *add* pip wheel. But it's there already and there's a much
> higher bar for removing useful functionality.

I personally have no problem with "pip wheel" staying, but it does muddy pip's
original intent as denoted by pip standing for "pip installs packages".

While "pip wheel" was added as a pragmatic way of getting wheels out there for
people to work with, pip's wheel functionality has only recently been added and
is unlikely to be widespread, e.g. in distro packages for pip. So it could be
reverted (since there are alternatives) and ISTM that the likely impact would
only be on a few early adopters. Note that I'm not arguing for reversion at all
- it makes sense for there for multiple implementations of wheel building and
usage so that interoperability wrinkles can be ironed out.

Regards,

Vinay Sajip

[1] https://gist.github.com/vsajip/4988471