[Distutils] it's happened - wheels without sdists (flit)

[Ben Finney]

Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> writes:

> I see it as more a matter of eventually migrating to a "devdir -> sdist ->
> wheel -> installed" build & deployment pipeline

Yes. Increasingly often these days, that first distinction (dev
working tree is not the same as source for distribution) gets ignored,
and actively obliterated.

Getting many GitHub or Bitbucket projects to distribute a source
release, that doesn't have a mess of build artifacts in it, is an
exercise in great frustration – largely because those platforms provide
no convenient means to distribute tarballs that are *not* an
undifferentiated bundling of everything in the repository.

> where the tools used at each stage are only required to support the
> transition to the next stage

For the “dev tree → sdist” transition, part of the battle is going to be
educating developers that such a distinction actually exists. The common
bad practice of including build artifacts in VCS obliterates the
separate “package the source for distribution” step, which means that
step is rarely reproducible or reliable.

-- 
 \         “Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require |
  `\           hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be |
_o__)                                appreciated.” —Edsger W. Dijkstra |
Ben Finney