[Distutils] Thank you for the ability to do `pip install git+https://...`

[Jeremy Stanley]

On 2016-04-01 17:16:15 +0300 (+0300), Alex Grönholm wrote:
> I'm sorry if I offended anyone. I was just trying to point out
> that in the case of Github (or any other service that provides
> automated tarball generation) it's better to install from those
> rather than using the VCS integration plugins. Oh, and for the
> record, I just tested -- it does a deep clone at this time, which
> would be responsible for the slowness compared to installing from
> a tarball.

Whether this can work depends entirely on the project being
installed. Some don't check package metadata into their repos in a
form consumable by pip, and require an additional sdist build step
which may need information from the VCS itself or manually provided
during that step.

A prime example of this is projects using PBR, which will want
access to Git tag and commit details to determine the package
version. With a local clone of the project's Git repository (not
just a tarball/zip snapshot of its content) you can build a
pip-supported sdist, but otherwise you may need to manually
determine and set version information in the calling environment or
by editing to be able to then generate a usable sdist from the raw
source tree.
-- 
Jeremy Stanley