[Distutils] Dynamic linking between Python modules

[Jonathan Helmus]

On 05/21/2015 12:33 PM, Paul Moore wrote:
> 1. Anything that can take an sdist and build a wheel can be treated as
> a "build tool". You could run the appropriate build tool for your
> package manually, but it's a goal for pip to provide a unified
> interface to that process.
Paul,

    Thanks for the wonderfully clear email, it helped solidify a number
of questions I had on pip, wheels and build tools.  From the section
above it sounds like a tool that is capable of converting between conda
packages and wheel files (and possibility other binary Python formats)
could bridge the two systems and help root out where the wheel format is
lacking.  Combined with conda's build system such a converter could
serve as a pip pluggable "build tool" to take an sdist and produce a
wheel using a workflow more familiar to the segment of the scientific
python community who use conda.   Obviously there are a number of
technical challenges that would need to be overcome (shared libraries,
Python entry points, etc) and I'm guessing some political issues. 
None-the-less, I'd be willing to try to prototype such a tool if other
think it would be of use.

Cheers,

    - Jonathan Helmus