[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 12:18 PM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:49 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Then you are also in favor of removing sdist support from the "pip
>> install" command, in the same way that rpm doesn't automatically
>> compile srpm.
>
> I was not aware that pip could create sdists.

In my view the fact that pip creates an installation as an artifact of
installing from a source package is equivalent to creating a wheel,
given that wheel is a format defined as a zip file containing one
installation of a distribution. Both operations equally ruin pip's
reputation as being an installer instead of a build tool. Instead all
installation should have an intermediate, static, documented binary
representation created by the build tool that is later moved into
place by the install tool. I would be pleased if "pip install" lost
the ability to natively install sdists without that intermediate step.