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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 31 March 2015 at 17:10, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 31 March 2015 at 08:04, Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 30 March 2015 at 16:56, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> Hmm, I don't think I'd ever really understood the distinction between
>> "development setup" and "sdist" that clearly. I take your point, it's
>> the sdist level that we want to avoid executable metadata formats in.
>
> Thinking some more about that, my confusion is probably in part
> because pip doesn't distinguish between a "development directory" and
> a sdist at the moment. For both, it runs "setup.py
> bdist_wheel/install". So I guess work on a new sdist format would have
> to include pip learning to distinguish between a sdist and a working
> directory, and installing (or building wheels from) the two things
> differently.

Yep, the current PEP 426 draft suggests that sdists should grow a
"dist-info" directory (akin to wheel files and installed packages),
while development directories would continue to lack any of the
generated metadata.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia