[Distutils] Packages that have problems being installed from wheels

[James Tocknell]

Scipy (the package) doesn't work due to the build requirement on numpy (and
the lack of metadata stating this), however some of the others have
included https://bitbucket.org/dholth/setup-requires (or something
equivalent) to install using numpy. Effectively, if the package can be pip
installed, then wheeling should work (I created a script a while ago which
uses distlib to modify scipy wheels such that they contain the correct
metadata, and I haven't run into any issues). Matplotlib works, however
some of the graphics toolkits aren't wheelable (e.g. pygtk and pyqt).

One case that I know of where wheels do not replace a straight install is
PySide (there needs to be rpath modification), however the PySide
developers are aware of this and in their installation instructions they
explicitly mention to run a post install script if installing from a wheel
(The post install probably could be got rid of if $ORIGIN was used, but
that would involve digging into the cmake install, and checking that it
doesn't break anything. Also, I'm not sure how widely $ORIGIN is
supported). I'd guess that any package which creates shared libraries which
link to each other would have this problem also, though how many of those
are pip installable is probably almost none.

James


On 27 August 2014 17:29, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>
> On Aug 27, 2014, at 2:50 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> tl; dr; If you know of a project that can't be successfully installed
> with "pip wheel proj; pip install /path/to/the/wheel.whl" can you let
> me know the details?
>
> One of the longer-term goals of the introduction of wheels was to
> split the build and install steps for a package - specifically, in
> pip, to restrict "pip install" to installing from wheels, and when no
> wheel is available, to (transparently) run "pip wheel" on the sdist
> followed by "pip install on the generated wheel". During a discussion
> yesterday, I realised that I don't know how close we are to that goal.
> So I'm looking for information on packages which don't install
> properly from wheels at the moment. If anyone has examples of packages
> where replacing "pip install foo" with "pip wheel -w /tmp/xxx; pip
> install /tmp/xxx/*.whl" does not result in an equivalent install,
> could they post them here with details of how & why they fail?
>
> Things I already know about (but would like specific examples):
>
> 1. Post-install steps included in setup.py. That should be covered by
> the support in Metadata 2.0. I'd also be interested in how much of an
> issue omitting the postinstall would be in practice (for instance many
> such steps just set up "Start Menu" type shortcuts, which are not
> essential for the package to be usable).
> 2. Actually, that's the only one :-)
>
> Things that should not be a problem (but might be):
>
> 1. Numpy (and the scipy stack) need better tagging facilities for
> wheels - but that wouldn't matter for a wheel that's built, used, then
> thrown away.
> 2. Some things are complex to build - but I don't know of any cases
> where building a wheel is *more* complex than installing, and I don't
> see how it could be, in theory.
> 3. Projects that customise setup.py so much that they aren't
> compatible with setuptools and bdist_wheel. Such projects are quite
> probably already incompatible with pip (which injects setuptools when
> running setup.py anyway) and so not relevant for this discussion. But
> if any do work with "pip install" but not "pip wheel", I'd like to
> hear about them.
>
> Thanks in advance for any information.
> Paul
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>
>
> Numpy (and other SciPy stack) has the problem too that it uses
> numpy.distutils
> so I'm not even sure if ``pip wheel`` actually works on it at all or not.
> They
> might have their own support for ``setup.py bdist_wheel`` though I don't
> know.
>
>  ---
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>
>


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