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

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 8 October 2015 at 14:34, Ionel Cristian Mărieș <contact at ionelmc.ro> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 4:01 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:
>>
>> One of the features in the original PEP was the ability to produce
>> multiple
>> different Wheels from the same source release much like how Debian does.
>> e.g.
>> numpy-1.0.newsdistthing could produce numpy-pyopenblas-12.6.whl and
>> numpy-mkl-7.8.whl, etc etc where there would be a bunch of names/versions
>> that
>> would differ from the name/version of the original sdist thing that was
>> being
>> proposed.
>
>
> Sorry if this sounds obtuse but isn't that useless overspecialization? They
> can just publish `numpy-mlk` and `numpy-thatblas` or whatever on PyPI, and
> that will even work better when it comes to dependencies.
> I mean, if you
> build something for `numpy-mkl` then it wouldn't work on a `numpy-otherblas`
> anyway right?

It depends. If you're using numpy from pure Python code the difference
between mkl and otherblas is probably irrelevant. So in most cases
you'd want to be able to depend just on "numpy" but in some cases
you'd need to be more specific. Perhaps you could solve that with
"provides"...

Really though it's probably best to keep the set of binaries on PyPI
internally consistent and not try to represent everything. My point
earlier was that regardless of what goes on PyPI as the official numpy
wheel there will be many people using the numpy code in other ways. If
pip is not the only consumer of a source release then it's not really
reasonable to dictate (and redesign in a less human-friendly way) its
layout purely for pip's benefit.

--
Oscar