[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Lennart Regebro]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 6:09 PM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

How installing something can ruin the reputation as an installer is beyond me.

> 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.

That's a separate issue, but I disagree with that as well.

//Lennart