[Distutils] pywin32 on wheels [was: Beyond wheels 1.0: helping downstream, FHS and more]

[Paul Moore]

On 16 April 2015 at 14:43, Kevin Horn <kevin.horn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Those that want to use pywin32 in a virtualenv (or just without all the
> system changes) could simply install the wheel (or even an sdist, perhaps)
> from the command line using pip, and then perform whatever other steps they
> want manually.

Just as a data point, converting the existing wininst installer for
pywin32 to a wheel (using wheel convert), and installing that via pip,
is entirely workable (for the win32api/win32file type basic
functionality). The pypiwin32 project (started by Glyph as a way of
providing pywin32 wheels from PyPI) includes wheels for Python 3.x
which I built that way, so it's certainly seen some level of use.

The wheels are probably unnecessarily big, as they'll include all of
pythonwin, and the ActiveX Scripting and service creation support,
which I guess won't work in that configuration, but they are a good
starting point for checking precisely what will work unmodified from a
wheel.

Paul