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

[Daniel Holth]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>
>> On Mar 30, 2015, at 11:18 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.
>>
>
> An archive of the repository is not the same thing as a source release.
>
> Honestly, most of my setup.py’s look basically the same as a flit ini
> file, just inside of python instead of ini. For example, I’m not sure
> how something like https://github.com/pypa/packaging/blob/master/setup.py
> or https://github.com/pypa/warehouse/blob/master/setup.py or
> https://github.com/pypa/twine/blob/master/setup.py or
> https://github.com/pypa/readme/blob/master/setup.py would be improved by
> moving it to a ini file instead of a python file.
>
> The current toolchain absolutely has some problems, but I’m not convinced
> that shuffling around the same data into different locations is the answer
> to those problems.

The way to solve the problems is to allow anyone to try by providing
good hooks that do not require extending distutils.