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

[Ian Cordasco]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 11:15 AM, Ionel Cristian Mărieș <contact at ionelmc.ro>
wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 6:55 PM, Ian Cordasco <graffatcolmingov at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> ​Now it might have skimpy docs and no users, but that's largely a product
> of time. I think `flit` should be judged on what it can be in the future,
> not all what it's right now. To put it in picture, the argument you're
> making is like comparing the amazon rainforest to a banana milkshake
> recipe.​
>

Well to make a better comparison, we're discussing a healthy diet to a
sugar laced treat. The healthy diet is sustainable because it is well
documented and has tons of users with experience with it, but has pitfalls
in that it can be expensive at times, while the sugar laced treat is good
for a quick blood sugar spike but will leave you thoroughly unsatisfied and
eventually wanting for the healthy diet.

New users, (like some people who prefer high sugar diets) may prefer the
initial simplicity, but at the cost of having to do a lot more work up
front. Those who follow a healthy diet (and ostensibly exercise regiment)
will have tooling to not have to worry about how to construct a healthy
diet. New users who find and work with those already on a healthy diet will
learn the tools that help them avoid the pitfalls of starting on a healthy
diet (e.g., tools that generate setup.py for you and maintain the 98% use
case, which is inevitably where new users fall*) and will be better off for
the long term.

* Note, new users still has yet to be defined by anyone advocating that
this is better for new users because of mystical reasons (like being able
to read the source code).
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