[Distutils] Builders vs Installers

[Daniel Holth]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Lennart Regebro <regebro at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

We have a different definition of build tools if installing an sdist
that has a C extension doesn't make pip a build tool already. Clearly
we're just going to disagree on this one.