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

[Alex Clark]

On 3/30/15 11:56 AM, Donald Stufft wrote:
>
>> On Mar 30, 2015, at 11:52 AM, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 30 March 2015 at 16:45, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>> Well, parts of it are turing complete, since it pulls the version number
>>> out of the module itself and that’s just Python too.
>>
>> Sorry, I wasn't specifically looking at flit there. But I'm in the
>> camp that says just put the version in your ini file and in your
>> module, and don't worry that you have it in 2 places. If managing
>> version numbers is the biggest showstopper in moving to declarative
>> metadata, then we've won :-)
>>
>> Paul
>
> Honestly, I don’t think that setup.py as a development interface is that
> bad. It gets really bad when we start sticking it inside of a sdist and
> using that as part of the installation metadata.
>
> It’s not unusual for me to want (or need) to do something a little bit
> different in a project, or something that the original authors didn’t
> quite intend to do. This is perfectly valid and fine inside of a file
> that only ever gets executed on a developer machine. However it *needs*
> to be “compiled” down to a static file when creating a sdist.


Right, that is my understanding: setup.py is fine except when it is 
executed on installation.

But I think there is a slight cognitive advantage to setup.ini vs. 
setup.py. You can never execute an ini file, even in development. So the 
same file can (somehow) be used in development and production without 
"compiling down" first. In other words: maybe switching to ini is the 
right thing to do long term.

However, the practicality of doing so may be so small (due to 
disutils/setuptools baggage and/or inability to overcome setup.py 
momentum) that "compiling down" (setup.py) becomes a more attractive 
first step, at least.


>
> ---
> Donald Stufft
> PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA
>
>
>
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Alex Clark · http://about.me/alex.clark