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

[Ian Cordasco]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Daniel Holth <dholth at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:55 AM, Ian Cordasco
> <graffatcolmingov at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:47 AM, Ionel Cristian Mărieș <
> contact at ionelmc.ro>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 6:39 PM, Xavier Fernandez
> >> <xav.fernandez at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> I think the point was not to say that documentation is useless (and
> there
> >>> is some: http://flit.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ ) but that the
> >>> code/implementation is much simpler than the combination of
> >>> distutils/setuptools/bdist_wheel.
> >>>
> >>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 5:26 PM, Ian Cordasco
> >>> <graffatcolmingov at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> So for new python programmers (or newbie users in general) reading the
> >>>> entire source of another package to understand it is a better
> experience?
> >>>>
> >> To put that in context, flit goes for less than 600 SLOC while
> >> distutils+setuptools+wheel amount to over 20000 SLOC. At that ratio
> >> arguments for distutils+setuptools+wheel documentation seem
> unreasonable.
> >
> >
> > To be clear, no one should ever be advocating to "just read the source"
> as a
> > form of documentation. This is why the Packaging guide exists (because no
> > one should ever be expected to read the distutils, setuptools, or wheel
> > source to use it).
> >
> > Code is never as self-documenting as people like to believe. And since
> we're
> > talking about new users (without defining what they're new to) reading
> the
> > source should only be for educational purposes. cookiecutter will serve
> new
> > users better than flit or anything else. cookiecutter will teach new
> users
> > good package structure and take care of the (possibly hard parts) of a
> > setup.py. Then, when the "new user" goes to publish it, there's tons of
> > prior documentation on how to do it. If they run into problems using flit
> > they have the skimpy documentation or the source.
> >
> > Yeah, it's "easy" to read 600 SLOC for you, but what about for some "new
> > user"? Are they new to python? Why do they have to care about reading the
> > source if something else will "just work" as documented for their
> "simple"
> > use case?
>
> No one has advocated reading the source code instead of reading the
> documentation.
>

Thankfully this is a publicly archived list. Quoting yourself:

> Flit is one example, and you can understand it not by copy/pasting,
> but by spending half an hour reading its complete source code.

In which you advocate reading the source of a tool over using setup.py
which has countless resources written about it on the internet.
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