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

[Daniel Holth]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:22 AM, Ian Cordasco
<graffatcolmingov at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:18 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> setup.py as implemented with distutils/setuptools has a bit of a
>> Goldilocks problem: it's just right for a medium-complexity project
>> but when your project is very simple it's too hard, and when you get
>> to the point where you are trying to extend distutils by writing a
>> 10,000 line extension, yikes. So it's fantastic to be able to just
>> avoid distutils entirely if it isn't the right size for your project.
>> This example, flit, does not invoke any code from distutils,
>> setuptools or bdist_wheel to do its thing.
>>
>> A source release could just be an archive of the repository.
>
>
> You still have not answered how reading flit's source code to get it working
> is better than using cookiecutter to generate a project, and using `python
> setup.py bdist_wheel sdist` (which is well-documented, and has tons of
> answered questions on sites like StackOverflow to help in case of a
> problem).

It's simple. distutils, setuptools, and bdist_wheel are all terrible!
They solve a 57,000 package strong backwards compatibility problem,
and bdist_wheel specifically helps correct the tightly coupled
build-install design flaw in distutils, but if you can avoid them
great!

You probably would not have to actually read the source code to flit
in order to use it, but if it came down to that then it would not take
very long :)