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

[Xavier Fernandez]

Fair enough, I didn't think of compiled wheels :)
And having a clean way to run tests for the provided wheel is indeed an
other good point.

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 5:04 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>
> On Mar 30, 2015, at 10:58 AM, Xavier Fernandez <xav.fernandez at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Wheels without sdists are likely a generally bad idea, downstream
>> redistributors are not going to like them.
>>
>
> Why do you think that ? Wheels seem way simpler/saner than all the
> possible things setup.py can do.
>
>
> Wheels are simpler than a setup.py, because wheels are a binary format and
> Wheels don’t need to
> handle things like build software because it’s already been built. However
> downstream redistributors
> will not accept a Wheel as the source for a package because it is a binary
> format. It doesn’t matter
> if you can unzip it and there is pure python there, it is still a binary
> format. So if you release only Wheels
> you’re essentially saying that downstream redistributors will never
> package your software (or any
> software that depends on it).
>
> A few issues that Wheel only has:
>
> * If your project has a C extension, downstream redistributes need access
> to the source code not the
>   compiled code (as does anyone wanting to use the project on platform you
> didn’t release for).
>
> * If your project has tests that don’t get installed, they should get
> shipped as part of the sdist so that
>   downstream can run them as part of their packaging activities to ensure
> they didn’t break anything
>   in the test suite. However if you’re installing from Wheel you can’t do
> that.
>
> ---
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
>
>
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