[Distutils] Are there any plans to move to pip/wheels in buildout?

[Paul Moore]

On 3 December 2014 at 14:47, Jim Fulton <jim at zope.com> wrote:
>> Am I missing something about binary support with wheels?
>
> I don't think so.

Agreed.

It seems to me that the key issue currently is that for binary
distribution, pip only supports wheels, whereas buildout only supports
eggs. There are other tools which also tend to only support one or the
other (e.g., easy_install -> egg, distil -> wheel) but I think they
are the minority. I don't know relative popularity between pip and
buildout - I suspect it depends on the community involved.

For a project, decisions on which binary formats to provide probably
need to be based on the expected numbers of users of each tool.

The wheel and egg formats are similar enough to allow auto-conversion
(wheel convert does egg->wheel, I don't know if there's a tool to do
wheel->egg, but it wouldn't be hard to write) but expecting users to
maintain local converted repositories is a burden in itself, so the
question remains what binaries to upload to PyPI.

Paul