[Distutils] Towards a simple and standard sdist format that isn't intertwined with distutils

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Mon Oct 5 15:25:39 CEST 2015


On October 5, 2015 at 9:11:59 AM, Paul Moore (p.f.moore at gmail.com) wrote:
> On 5 October 2015 at 13:44, Donald Stufft wrote:
> > [3] Unlike Paul, I think a Source Wheel is actually a decent name for this
> > concept. It's similar to .rpm and .src.rpm in that world, and I think it
> > makes it more obvious that this item isn't an installable item in it's own
> > right, that it exists in order to produce binary wheels. However, this
> > concept is currently being handled by the sdist "format", however
> > ambigiously defined that currently is. I also think it makes it a bit
> > easier to get rid of the ambigous "package", since we can just call them
> > all "wheels" which is easier to say than "distribution".
> 
> Being a Windows user, I hadn't caught the parallel between
> Wheel-Source wheel and RPM-Source RPM (is there also a similar
> deb-source deb pair?)
> 
> But if the concept works for people with a Linux background, I'm OK with it.
> 
> (My main concern is that end users commonly make requests to projects
> saying "please provide wheels". I don't want that nice simple concept
> to get confused, if we can avoid it).
> 
> Paul
> 

I'm not dead set on the source wheel name or anything either fwiw. I liked the
parallels between that and .src.rpm and .rpm and I think the "sdist" name is
kind of a mouthful to say. The debian analog to a source rpm is just a "source
package", but that's really just a directory that you can run the debian build
tools in, it's not really a package format like source RPMs are. Source RPMs
have an "install" concept, but it's not really like pip's install, it just
unpacks the file into place so that you can later build it.

The main thing I wanted was something that wasn't a mouthful to say and that
had a dedicated extension so we don't end up where the filename looks
incredibly generic (requests-1.0.swhl vs requests-1.0.tar.gz). I liked the idea
of tying it into Wheels to keep the "new guard" of packaging formats related to
each other, but I'm also happy to use a different term.

-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA




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